Part IV - The reform agenda for recovered sovereignty
2 - Agriculture and food sovereignty
No nation can claim sovereignty if it is not capable of feeding its population. Food security is not a sectoral subject among others: it constitutes one of the material foundations of national independence. A State that depends on the outside to ensure the feeding of its people places itself, in fact, in a situation of permanent strategic vulnerability, exposed to blackmail, supply disruptions, and international crises.
Food sovereignty does not mean autarky or withdrawal, but the effective capacity to decide, to produce, and to arbitrate according to the national interest. It implies that France has, on its territory, the land, the know-how, the infrastructures, and the farmers necessary to guarantee, in all circumstances, access to sufficient, healthy, and controlled food.
Current dependencies: a confiscated sovereignty
The weakening of French agriculture does not stem from a simple economic decline or occasional errors in public policy. It is the product of a structural loss of sovereignty, closely linked to the transfer of commercial competence to the European Union, which became an exclusive competence.
France no longer decides freely with whom it trades, nor under what conditions. Free trade agreements are negotiated and concluded without national control over sanitary, social, environmental, or agricultural clauses. They place French farmers in direct competition with foreign productions subject to radically different standards, while imposing ever heavier constraints on domestic producers. To this commercial dependency is added a growing dependency on food imports, agricultural inputs, fertilizers, seeds, and energy. French agriculture, historically self-sufficient and export-oriented, has become vulnerable to logistical disruptions, geopolitical tensions, and decisions taken outside all national democratic control.
This situation reveals a major contradiction: farmers are required to comply with strict standards, while being exposed to unfair competition organized in the name of treaties they neither chose nor approved.
Protection of farmland and production capacities
Food sovereignty first requires the protection of farmland. Land is not a commodity like any other: it is a strategic asset. Its excessive concentration, financialization, or buyback by foreign interests constitute direct attacks on national independence. The sovereignty transition implies enhanced control of agricultural land sales, active struggle against the artificialization of productive soils, and priority given to the establishment, transmission, and maintenance of farms across the entire territory. These measures are planned and monitored by the Planning Commission, which coordinates the relevant actors, evaluates production capacities, and proposes necessary adjustments.
Status and income of farmers
No food sovereignty policy is possible without numerous, recognized, and correctly remunerated farmers. The status of the farmer is rethought as that of a strategic actor of the nation, and not of a simple producer subject to the vagaries of the global market.
Two complementary mechanisms guarantee a decent, stable, and predictable income. The first is a sovereign floor price: the State sets a minimum price below which no French agricultural product can be purchased on national territory. This price is defined by the Planning Commission on the basis of the real cost of production plus a viable margin, and is binding on large-scale retail as on the agri-food industry without exception. The second is a system of multi-year contracts: the State guarantees purchase contracts over three to five years to farmers who produce for national strategic needs (sovereign food stocks, school canteens, hospitals, military). These contracts provide long-term visibility that the market alone cannot offer.
Intermediaries who refuse to pass on floor prices through their margins to limit the impact on final prices expose themselves to direct competition from a zero-margin public structure. This is not a rhetorical threat: it is the mechanism that will structurally discipline margins without having to regulate them by decree.
Seed sovereignty
Dependency on seeds from major agrochemical groups (hybrid seeds that are not reproducible from one year to the next, patents that prevent farmers from reseeding their own harvest) is a direct attack on food sovereignty. A farmer who does not control his seeds does not control his production.
A sovereign public seed heritage is constituted: national bank of peasant varieties, reproducible and adapted to French terroirs. Non-reproducible seeds patented by foreign entities are prohibited on national territory. Farmers who today depend massively on these seeds benefit from a transition support (financial, technical, and agronomic) to recover their seed autonomy without production disruption.
This public heritage draws on a natural partnership with the network of seed conservation associations: Kokopelli and other equivalent associations that conserve, multiply, and transmit thousands of ancient peasant varieties. These associations are the living guardians of the national seed heritage; they ensure practical conservation, direct links with farmers, the transmission of peasant selection know-how, and cultivated biodiversity. The State supports them and draws on their network without nationalizing them or creating dependency on any one of them. The national reserve is the sovereign safety net behind this network: institutional conservation, availability in times of crisis, resource for farmers in transition. The two levels are complementary; the associative network ensures living conservation, the national reserve ensures sovereign strategic conservation.
Inputs - toward progressive sovereignty
Dependency on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers is a real strategic vulnerability: their production relies massively on imported natural gas, their price is subject to global geopolitical tensions, as demonstrated by the 2022 crisis. The sovereign response is progressive and combined.
In the short term, a sovereign nitrogen fertilizer industry is relocated to national territory, using French nuclear energy as a production base, which eliminates dependency on foreign gas and stabilizes costs for farmers. In parallel, the development of algaculture as a source of organic amendments and biostimulants is actively supported: marine algae, used as a complementary fertilizer since the 12th century on the Breton coasts, constitute a sovereign resource producible across all our maritime territories without additional flows. Rich in potassium, nitrogen, phosphorus, and growth hormones, they improve soil structure, water retention, and plant resistance to climate stress. They do not fully replace nitrogen fertilizers for large cereal crops in the short term, but significantly reduce dependency and create a sovereign high value-added supply chain. This is a strategic research axis developed in the dedicated reform agenda item.
Agricultural water management
Water is a national strategic resource whose management cannot be left to market forces alone nor concentrated in the hands of a few private actors. France faces a documented reduction of its renewable water resource (14% decline between 1990-2001 and 2002-2018) which imposes sovereign, collective, and sustainable management.
Agricultural water management follows the natural geography of watersheds and not administrative boundaries. A watershed commission composed of all users (irrigating and non-irrigating farmers, communes, industry, environmental associations) arbitrates uses under the supervision of the Planning Commission. Decisions draw on the input of relevant scientists and professionals: hydrologists, agronomists, fishing professionals according to the zones. Water resources are a national common good; their privatization for the benefit of a minority of users financed by everyone's money is incompatible with the principle of national equality. Arbitrations between competing uses (intensive irrigation, market gardening, livestock farming, drinking water supply, ecosystem needs) fall to the watershed commission, not to private negotiation between dominant actors.
Fishing and maritime resources
France has the world's largest exclusive maritime zone thanks to its overseas territories: 11 million km² spread across all oceans. This exceptional geographical reality is a sovereign resource that the European framework has progressively confiscated; fishing quotas in our own waters are defined in Brussels, often to the detriment of French fleets and to the benefit of Spanish, Dutch, or Danish fleets.
Recovered sovereignty implies the recovery of national control over fishing quotas in our exclusive economic zone. These quotas are defined sovereignly by the Planning Commission in direct liaison with the professional fishing organizations of each zone and on the basis of available scientific data on fish populations, so as not to fall into overfishing which would destroy the resource one seeks to protect. The approach on zones shared with neighboring countries is pragmatic: certain zones are managed by documented historical tradition within a bilateral framework, others are exclusively national. In all cases, the sustainability of the resource is the guiding principle, not short-term diplomatic pressures.
Resilience in the event of international crisis
Armed conflicts, diplomatic tensions, pandemics, energy or climate crises can at any moment disorganize global flows. France must be capable of ensuring the essential without depending on external decisions. Strategic food stocks, diversification of productions, maintenance of agricultural know-how, and capacity for rapid scale-up constitute national security imperatives planned, monitored, and evaluated jointly by the Planning Commission and the HCEP.
Agriculture is therefore not a simple economic sector to modernize or rationalize. It is a pillar of sovereignty, on a par with defense or energy. The refoundation of the State and the restoration of national independence necessarily pass through the full and complete reconquest of food sovereignty.