In this episode, I welcome Jacques Caplat. As an agronomist, he has worked in many roles — first as an agricultural advisor, then within several organizations involved in the development of organic farming and peasant seed systems. Jacques is also a lecturer and author. He has written several books, including Farming That Heals the Planet (Une agriculture qui répare la planète), co-authored with Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva. In his most recent book, Industrial Agriculture (Agriculture industrielle), he unpacks the origins and consequences of the agricultural model we now consider “conventional,” and highlights possible alternatives.
Hello Jacques, thank you for accepting this invitation. Could you briefly introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about your background?
I’m the son and grandson of a poor peasant, and I hold on to that very dearly because it’s a deep part of my identity.
I first trained as an agronomist engineer. I worked in a chamber of agriculture, then in an organic farming group as a field advisor. After that, I joined the National Federation of Organic Agriculture, where I got involved with national and European policy work.
At that time, I created, on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture, the database of organic seeds in France, and I coordinated the French expert group on organic seeds. Still on that topic, which marked me deeply, I co-founded in 2002–2003 the Peasant Seeds Network (Réseau Semences Paysannes), alongside Guy Kastler and François Delmond.
I also worked on environmental and agricultural policies related to organic farming, in collaboration with ministries and the European Union. Then, starting in 2008, I became what I like to call a “free electron” of agronomy: author, lecturer, and more broadly engaged in spreading ideas. Those are now my main activities.
In parallel, I began a PhD in social anthropology, which also led me to become an anthropologist. I was for many years a board member of the association Agir pour l’environnement, and I’m still active there on various agricultural and food-related issues.
Finally, I serve as the voluntary president of the French Association of Members of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, IFOAM. So I represent IFOAM France, which allows me to continue contributing to international discussions on organic farming.
In your book Industrial Agriculture: Stop Everything and Think! you take stock of what we call conventional agriculture: a model which, despite significant technical progress, still doesn’t allow most farmers to make a decent living from their work, seems unable to respond to crises like climate change, and which, on the contrary, is the source of many environmental, social, and health problems. Why and how did this model, which we now call “conventional agriculture,” come to dominate?
That’s a very good question, I always start my talks with this explanation: it’s essential to understand this first if we want to see what room for maneuver we actually have. We need to grasp what’s specific about the type of agriculture that dominates the world today in order to be able to change it.
The big mistake is to think there’s only one agriculture, universal. Many agronomists, farmers, politicians believe that. But if you imagine there’s just one model, then all you do is adapt it — with or without chemicals, intensive or extensive, peasant-based or industrial — while the real issue lies elsewhere.
I like to say that “agriculture” doesn’t exist: there are agricultures. Conventional agriculture is just one form among others.
Historically, it developed in Europe, but originally came from the Fertile Crescent — today’s Lebanon, Syria, Iraq — which is one of the birthplaces of agriculture. And I insist: one, not the birthplace, but one among ten, fifteen, even twenty known around the world (China, Central America, etc.). In that region, agriculture was organized around dryland cereal crops, which lent themselves to what we call “pure crops,” meaning a single plant grown on a plot.
That feels “normal” today, but it’s actually an exception. Most other agricultures were based on combinations of plants, not monoculture. That initial orientation shaped the whole logic of performance in this model.
Another specificity was the scientific mindset that accompanied it in Europe: reductionism. Inherited from Greek thought, especially Aristotle, it’s the idea that you can understand the world by breaking it down into simple elements, into equations. Useful, of course, but if you stop there, you lose sight of the relationships between elements. For example: under trees, yields may look lower; a reductionist mindset concludes you should cut down the trees. But a systemic perspective, looking at the whole plot and the long term, shows that trees actually improve fertility and yield stability.
In the 19th century, this logic brought about a turning point: once the six essential elements for plants were identified (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium), people decided to supply the last three (NPK) directly through soluble fertilizers. It was effective, but it broke the balance with soil life. Plants became overloaded with minerals, weakened, and more exposed to diseases and pests. Hence the massive spread of pesticides, alongside fertilizers and irrigation.
There’s also another legacy, in France dating back to the time of Louis XIII and Louis XIV: the creation of academies. In agriculture, this meant delegitimizing peasant knowledge. Agronomists, initially called physiocrats, were designated as the ones who knew; peasants were to apply. This rupture is still very deep. Combined with reductionism, it led to extremely productive plant and animal breeding systems, but ones totally dependent on an artificialized environment.
That sums up conventional agriculture well: a system based on the will to control and artificialize nature. As long as that control holds, yields are impressive. But as soon as control is lost, like with climate disruption, everything collapses.
It’s called “conventional” not because it’s better, but because it imposed itself historically: through European conquests from the 16th century, then in the 19th century, and finally through the “Green Revolution” of the 1970s. Today, it structures the global agricultural economy and has become the institutional norm.
To complete the picture – and later we’ll be able to branch out into all sorts of themes from this general foundation – I should say that what I’ve talked about so far has mostly been technical evolutions, choices made in good faith by agronomists or political leaders who were sincere. It wasn’t originally designed to exploit farmers.
But there was a major event in human history, and in agriculture in particular: the Industrial Revolution. We could even go back a bit earlier, with the appropriation of land during the enclosure movement in England, followed by colonization. That marked the invention of private property over land, a first capitalist step in grabbing resources.
The truly decisive stage, however, came in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution. At that time, in the Western world — which then imposed its logic on the rest of the globe — what we call industrial agriculture developed, characterized by an obsession with massification.
The goal was to produce a lot, in a uniform and standardized way. That meant calibrating fruits, breeding animals with particular body types, all to enable large-scale industrial processing and easier transport by train. The train was a genuine revolution: it allowed large cities to grow, which hadn’t really been possible before, except for a few capitals on coasts or big rivers.
This logic of massification, uniformization, and standardization led to a centralization of economic and technical organization. If wheat always needs to be identical, then seed selection must be centralized. That ties back to the reductionist logic I mentioned earlier: producing completely standardized varieties, and an agricultural economy that becomes centralized overall, to the benefit of large multinational firms.
Little by little, the farmer became just a subcontractor.
In France, up until the mid-20th century, there was still a dual system: industrial agriculture, already very present (much more so than some historical accounts suggest), and peasant agriculture, which lasted until the 1960s. But from then on, the whole sector shifted toward the industrial model.
You just explained that the origins of industrial agriculture go back quite far, but that there was a turning point that began before World War II and really accelerated afterward. Can we say there was a kind of consensus at that time on the need to industrialize agriculture, shared across political movements — whether Marxist, reformist, or capitalist?
Yes, that becomes even clearer if we look at the 19th century, when this idea was really theorized. By the 20th century, it had almost become self-evident, something that wasn’t questioned anymore.
In the 19th century, it was still debated. Some opposed it, like Élisée Reclus, one of the founders of modern geography and anarchism. He was internationally renowned for his geographical work and criticized this industrial logic, but many considered industrialization to be obvious and natural.
In conservative circles, on the right for example, industrialization was seen as a way to accumulate wealth and strengthen the rents of large landowners. Most land belonged to big estates, and for them, this model made perfect sense.
Even in reformist or center-left circles, there was a similar idea: a paternalistic myth that you had to “make people happy against their will.” The same myth was at work in colonialism, where the idea was that to feed European populations, peripheral populations had to be exploited. We shouldn’t forget that Europe’s prosperity, in Britain as in France, was built on colonial exploitation.
In agriculture, this reasoning translated into the will to feed the European population by industrializing production, in order to supply more to workers and ordinary people. It was presented as a virtuous ideal, even though in reality it rested on exploitation and had many dark sides.
On the Marxist side, it’s even more surprising. Some Marxist texts considered peasants to be a “class in itself,” because they were both owners of their means of production and workers seeking to increase their wealth. In reality, they were both exploiters and exploited, and that dual status was seen as an obstacle to revolution. For Marxists, the peasantry had to be reduced, transformed into agricultural wage laborers or urban workers, so they would develop class consciousness. The goal was to elevate the urban worker and see the peasant as an obstacle to progress.
This analysis was also deeply gendered: half of the agricultural workforce in the 19th century was female, and women were not landowners. They only contributed their labor, without capital. So the peasantry was not exempt from Marxist divisions of labor: men owned the means of production and benefited from the labor of women and children, while the latter provided labor without any associated capital.
In the end, for all these reasons, agricultural industrialization seemed widely accepted and was considered human progress. It was only a handful of thinkers, like Élisée Reclus and other early anarchists or proto-ecologists, who began sounding the alarm about the dangers of this model for the environment.
By the mid-20th century, that sense of self-evidence persisted. Take the example of Edgard Pisani, Minister of Agriculture under De Gaulle. I met him a few years before his death: at a hundred years old, he had incredible energy and eloquence. He still admired De Gaulle, even though they had fallen out after May 1968, and his appointment as Agriculture Minister had been almost by chance, since he wasn’t a specialist in the field.
His vision was sincere: he wanted to modernize French agriculture. But he organized land consolidation, contributed to the massive industrialization of agriculture and, unfortunately, to the disappearance of much of the small peasantry and to the destruction of ecosystems. By the 1970s, just 10–15 years after these reforms, he himself admitted his mistakes and spent the rest of his life trying to correct them. That shows just how sincere and well-intentioned he was.
That’s a question I find really fascinating, and one I often ask myself: what are the things we don’t see today — or that I personally take for granted — that in 10 or 20 years will make people say, “How could you ever believe that, or support that decision?”
That’s why I find it so interesting to look back at history and notice who managed to identify problems very early on, long before most people were aware of them. That’s also what I try to do in this podcast — especially around technology, a field I know a little about, and the myth of technological progress in agriculture. Many people, maybe most, still see technological progress as something positive — or at least neutral.
So taking that step back is useful. It helps us apply the same lens to today and ask: what feels obvious now… but really isn’t? What will we only realize in 10 or 20 years?
For me, the key is always asking: why are we doing this in the first place?
The big issue — in agriculture as in many other fields — is that we often stay locked on a path without ever revisiting where it started. We keep following a decision without asking: why was this choice made at the time? What problem was it supposed to solve?
And very often, we find ourselves still applying an answer to a question that doesn’t even exist anymore. That’s why history matters: it lets us recover the original intention and sometimes see that it no longer makes sense.
There are really two aspects here. First, some of the problems that shaped earlier choices simply don’t exist today. And second, even when the question is still relevant, we now have different answers — knowledge has advanced, new alternatives have opened up. What once looked inevitable may no longer be the best solution.
Take plant breeding. In a reductionist framework, it means keeping each generation’s individuals that best fit the model you want. It sounds logical: you save the ear of wheat or corn you like best so it provides the seed for the following year. A simple, coherent way of reasoning.
But it’s not the only way. Other approaches to breeding, based on different principles, can also deliver excellent results — even in terms of yield.
The same goes for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. At one point, they may have looked like the best solution. But they weren’t the only solution.
And that’s the challenge we face now: when a way of thinking that once seemed unavoidable ends up leading us into an ecological dead end, our responsibility is to ask: do we have other options?
And for almost all the big questions in agriculture, my answer is yes. We do. And it’s time we start using them.
And in what ways do the choices we make in agriculture today go beyond just producing food?
Because agriculture is something absolutely fundamental. That might sound obvious, but we’re not always fully aware of it. In France, for example, agriculture covers about half the country’s land area. That’s huge — no other activity even comes close to occupying a tenth of that space.
So whatever happens in agriculture has an enormous impact on our landscapes. And let’s not forget: agriculture accounts for between a quarter and a third of climate change. A quarter if we only count primary production, more than a third if we include the entire agri-food chain. These aren’t my numbers, they’re from the IPCC, and they reflect the scientific consensus. That gives you an idea of the scale of the issue.
Agriculture is also one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss. The IPBES — basically the biodiversity equivalent of the IPCC — identifies five major causes of collapse, and three are directly linked to agriculture: climate change, for which agriculture is responsible for about a quarter to a third; the massive use of toxic chemicals, mainly from farming; and the destruction of natural habitats — hedgerows torn out, wetlands drained, fields enlarged, and so on.
In other words, agriculture sits at the heart of the two great crises threatening humanity: the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis. It also consumes most of our freshwater in France. The majority of water used by humans goes to agriculture, putting enormous pressure on a resource that is absolutely vital for survival.
And then there’s the economic and social dimension. When agriculture becomes the foundation for capitalist empires, it feeds into the dangerous dynamics of capitalism itself: this relentless drive to accumulate wealth. For a long time, I was cautious about blaming “capitalism” — I thought it was too simplistic. But the more I’ve studied the history of agriculture, the more convinced I am that capitalism really is the fundamental problem humanity faces today.
Why? Because capitalism, by definition, means concentrating resources in the hands of a minority at the expense of the majority. That’s it, nothing more. And that logic inevitably leads to rising inequality: the rich grow ever richer, while the poor grow ever poorer and more numerous. At some point, that simply can’t hold.
You can see this very clearly in agriculture. Large farms swallow up smaller ones, leading to land grabbing on a massive scale. Farms get so big that only multinationals or banks can take them over. The same goes for water, with mega-reservoir projects that benefit only a handful of farmers while leaving everyone else worse off. This fuels a dynamic of wealth accumulation that’s also a dynamic of social exclusion — and that’s deeply dangerous for society.
And finally, we have to look at the direct impact on what we eat and on our health. The agro-industrial model has every interest in pushing unhealthy diets. It encourages us to eat more meat than we need — some would say more than we need at all — and to consume too much sugar and too many processed foods. In short, it locks us into a food system that is bad for our health, destructive of ecosystems, and unsustainable in the medium and long term.
At the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned that in the 20th century there was already a kind of consensus around the need for industrial agriculture to feed the population — in France in particular. That dynamic accelerated after the war, when production was a problem, and industrial agriculture was seen as the solution. Today, we hear a lot about “food sovereignty.” Could you explain where that term comes from, what it actually means, and how some actors in agriculture or politics have reappropriated it — to the point of stripping it of its meaning?
Yes — and for those of us who have been working on this concept for 20 or 30 years, seeing how it’s been co-opted today is pretty staggering.
First, there’s one essential thing to understand: when we talk about “feeding the world” — which is, of course, a central issue — we need to realize that the industrial or conventional agricultural model actually produces hunger. One of the great myths of this system is that it helps fight hunger. In reality, it creates it. That’s the core contradiction: it was developed to feed the world, but it cannot do so.
Colonial history shows this very clearly. The claim that this model could feed the world has always been a lie, because it was built at the expense of other populations. When wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, poverty is created. It’s that simple: if you divert wealth toward a minority, you create poor people — and poor people don’t have the means to feed themselves. That is the real cause of hunger.
Today, humanity produces one and a half times what it needs to feed everyone. And that’s despite the enormous resources wasted on industrial livestock farming, which makes no sense. If we ended it, vast areas of land would be freed up for human food production. Whether we go further and question livestock altogether is a complex debate — not one to open here. But on industrial livestock, there’s no debate: it’s absurd. Without it, we could feed 12 to 15 billion people.
So why is there still hunger in the world? Because of poverty. Take Brazil: it’s a major agricultural exporter, yet 5 to 10 percent of its people go hungry. Why? Because the model is built around exports and vast neo-colonial estates, undermining small farmers and local production. By contrast, in a very poor country like Malawi, the wealthy don’t go hungry. You see clearly that hunger is a direct consequence of poverty, not of insufficient production.
This is the context in which the concept of food sovereignty emerged. It addresses many of the issues we’ve been talking about. In fact, you could think of it as the collective version of autonomy.
And autonomy is not the same as autarky. Raising a child to be autonomous doesn’t mean teaching them to live alone in a cabin in the woods. It means helping them gain control over their choices. Agriculture is the same. Autonomy means mastering your own techniques, practices, and economics. That doesn’t prevent you from buying or selling outside, or from using knowledge developed elsewhere. But it does mean doing all that consciously and in control.
When we talk about autonomy at the scale of a single farmer, we just call it autonomy. At the scale of a society — whether that’s France, Europe, Brittany, northern Benin, or all of West Africa — we call it food sovereignty. It’s not an absolute concept, but a political and social construction: a group of people deciding together what kind of agriculture they want, what kind of food they want, and what kind of social organization flows from that.
That’s what food sovereignty is: giving societies control over their agricultural and food future.
Originally, the idea came from Indigenous peoples fighting to reclaim control of their farming and food systems in the face of colonial domination. Later, it was taken up as a core demand by La Vía Campesina — which is now the largest peasant movement in human history, in terms of membership. And it’s a fascinating movement, because it brings together peasant and organic farming, a strong commitment to women’s emancipation, the defense of LGBTQ rights, and the protection of Indigenous peoples’ rights. All of these are connected: it’s about defending autonomy — of individuals and of societies.
That is what food sovereignty really means.
And that’s exactly why its current misuse is so problematic. When part of the French right or some conservative farm unions talk about “food sovereignty,” what they really mean is “food nationalism.” They confuse sovereignty — meaning autonomy and collective freedom — with a kind of closed, chauvinistic nationalism that says “what we produce here is better.” But that’s not the point at all. Food sovereignty doesn’t mean claiming French production is better than anyone else’s. It simply means making sure the French people have a say in the choices that shape their agriculture and food.
You mentioned Brazil earlier, so let me use that to jump into another question about the international trade of food commodities, which keeps growing. Even leaders like President Lula — who is officially an ally of peasant movements like the Landless Workers’ Movement, a member of Via Campesina — still support free trade agreements such as the one between the European Union and Mercosur. That raises an important question: what role can exports play in an agroecological world? And that also brings us to the distinction between autonomy and autarky.
Lula is a mystery to me — or rather, a disappointment. Here’s someone who comes out of the union movement, from the world of the poor, and who ended up letting himself be convinced — probably in good faith — by a whole neoliberal ideology.
What’s interesting is to look at his trajectory over time. You can see the difference between his first term, his second, and now his return after the interlude — first with his ally Dilma Rousseff, then with Bolsonaro. And when he came back, he came back further to the right than when he left.
Of course, that was still better than Bolsonaro, who would have been far worse. Sometimes you just have to choose the lesser evil. But Lula today is no longer the model he once was. Twenty years ago, he embodied enormous hope. That’s no longer the case.
To be fair, though, he’s always faced a Congress that was largely against him.
Yes, absolutely. That’s true. Lula has always had to deal with a Congress stacked against him. So, yes, part of it is that he let himself be convinced by certain dogmas, but part of it is also that he was trapped in a system that cornered him anyway. And after so many compromises, the line between compromise and complicity starts to blur. Which is a shame, because compromise in itself isn’t dishonorable — in a complex political world, it’s often the only way to move forward.
But on agriculture, I think he’s really taken the wrong path. He’s dependent, for his political and economic survival, on the people who control the money. And there’s probably some cynicism there — understandable, in a way — when he thinks: “If I don’t want Brazil to collapse into chaos, I have to make sure the economic powers don’t crush me.” The problem is that this logic forces him to keep making concessions.
A very telling example: he recently (re)authorized the export of soybeans grown on land deforested since 2008. There was an international agreement banning this to slow deforestation. By overturning it, he broke a treaty signed with other countries. That’s a clear sign he’s given in to a form of cynicism, probably because he feels the alternative would be worse. But the outcome is undeniably bad.
Brazil really illustrates how complex these compromises are. There are literally two ministries of agriculture: one for industrial, export-oriented farming, and another for small-scale family farming for local consumption. This dual structure existed before Lula, under his predecessor, and Lula kept it in place. That shows how particular and complicated local dynamics can be.
So is there anything worth keeping in the principle of exporting?
Yes — we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking exports must stop altogether. International trade has always existed, long before agriculture itself. Archaeology shows that even hunter-gatherers engaged in long-distance trade, especially for certain fish products. So trade itself isn’t the problem. The real question is: how is it organized?
First, does it cause social harm in exporting or importing countries? Does it concentrate wealth, create a kind of modern slavery, or impoverish people? That’s one of the biggest problems with current industrial agriculture. Second, what’s the ecological impact of transport? Is it sustainable, or is it disastrous for the climate?
Once you set those criteria, you can see that some forms of trade can actually be healthy. Take mainland France: it will never grow bananas, cocoa, or coffee. So importing them makes sense. And those crops can, in principle, be grown ecologically. All three are mid-story plants that thrive under the canopy of tropical trees in agroforestry systems. You can preserve parts of the forest, keep a viable ecosystem, grow staple foods, and add these cash crops underneath. In that setting, they become a useful source of complementary income for local people, helping them access tools, services, or other goods. And if these products are shipped by boat — and maybe one day again by sailboats — the impact can be manageable.
Likewise, it makes sense for France to export products tied to its cultural and gastronomic heritage, like wine or cheese, if livestock farming continues. These are identity-based products, and their export is legitimate.
But exporting French wheat to North Africa keeps local agriculture there trapped in poverty. The same goes for flooding West Africa with milk powder or frozen chicken — it destroys local farm economies. Conversely, importing vast amounts of soy from Brazil is disastrous twice over: for Brazil, because of deforestation; and for Europe, because the protein and nitrogen surplus leads to ecological disasters like the green algae blooms in Brittany. Brittany alone imports as much soy from Brazil as its own farmland covers, just to feed livestock. It’s as if the region had doubled its farmland artificially. And of course, the nitrogen surplus overwhelms local ecosystems.
That’s why so much of today’s import-export circuits need to be reduced or even eliminated. But not on principle — not out of a rejection of trade itself. What we need is to completely transform the logic of trade.
When we talk about industrial agriculture, hybrid seeds or GMOs often come up. In the case of GMOs, for example, public debate tends to focus heavily on their potential health risks. That’s one aspect, of course, but in reality there are many other reasons why the way seeds are managed today — not just GMOs — is problematic. Could you tell us a bit more about that?
This is a really important issue, especially in the current context of climate disruption. As I mentioned earlier, the conventional model was built on the scientific assumption that you could control the environment. So you end up with plants that perform extremely well — but only in perfectly controlled conditions.
That was already misleading, because it only really worked in Europe and Canada. Even in the United States, where you might have expected it to work, it never really did, because American farming has always been very extensive. In fact, even there, organic farming now yields better results than conventional. But in Europe and Canada, this conventional model was highly productive. That’s why people say it delivers much higher yields than organic — which is true, but only in those regions. Everywhere else, the model never really worked, because the varieties selected in these theoretical, highly mathematical agronomic models only deliver good yields when the environment is under total control.
And GMOs are even worse. By definition, they’re designed in the lab. That’s literally what “GMO” means: you can’t create them without human intervention at the most fundamental biological level. They’re built in a lab, then reintroduced into fields. So you have a theoretical model created under artificial conditions, which you then try to replicate in real environments.
It’s a completely exogenous technique — coming from outside, impossible for farmers to control, and totally foreign to the ecosystem where it’s planted. Economically, GMOs only make sense if they’re produced on a massive scale, because they’re expensive. That’s actually true of patented seeds in general, but GMOs push this logic to the extreme: to be profitable, production has to be standardized, everyone growing the same thing.
Structurally, GMOs are designed for large-scale, uniform production — completely disconnected from farmers themselves. They’re not a tool for development. And development, as both an anthropologist and an agronomist specializing in rural development, I can say this with certainty: it only works if the people involved are autonomous.
Which brings us back to food sovereignty: populations need to have control over their tools, and the freedom to adapt their seeds as they see fit. GMOs don’t allow that. You need seeds adapted to local production systems, and GMOs don’t provide that either. They impose a centralized, standardized production model that makes no economic sense.
A textbook case that shows the absurdity of this logic is the so-called “golden rice.” You still hear some pseudo-skeptics who know nothing about agriculture claim it’s an example to follow. But golden rice is the perfect example of what not to do in agronomy. Sustainable agronomy — environmentally, socially, and nutritionally — depends on adaptation to local ecosystems and on crop diversity.
We need to move away from monocultures toward polycultures, crop mixtures. That allows us to optimize sunlight: when multiple crops coexist in a field, if one doesn’t do well because of conditions, another will take over. There will always be vegetation capturing solar energy and producing food. That’s pure thermodynamics.
With monocultures, including GMOs, if the climate isn’t favorable — as happens more and more often in France with climate change — yields collapse. And when yields collapse, soils are left bare, sunlight goes unused, and food isn’t produced. It’s a thermodynamic waste, a total waste of energy.
So the best agronomic performance and the highest biomass production come from mixed cropping, varietal diversity, and crop rotations combined with dietary diversity. Golden rice shows the opposite. The idea was to add vitamin A to rice to fix deficiencies in some Asian populations. But why were those populations vitamin A deficient in the first place? Because an industrial model based on rice monoculture had been imposed on them. In their traditional farming systems, rice was grown alongside vegetables and fruits — and there were no deficiencies. The problem was created by monoculture, and then the proposed solution was a genetically “enriched” rice. It’s agronomically foolish, because it exhausts the soil, and nutritionally absurd, because the real solution is simply to grow vegetables.
So to sum up the problem with GMOs, beyond health or environmental concerns — since yes, they release new genes into the environment that can disrupt neighboring species — there’s a fundamental agronomic flaw: extreme specialization. They amplify every weakness of industrial agriculture.
The real solution, to adapt to climate change and guarantee farmers’ autonomy — in other words, food sovereignty — is exactly the opposite: greater crop diversity, through what are called peasant seeds.
Peasant seeds aren’t just about going back to old varieties. Sometimes people think older is always better, or that local automatically means superior. That’s not it. A Nantes carrot isn’t better just because it’s from Nantes. The point of old varieties is pragmatic: they’re the only ones left, at least in Europe, that still offer genetic diversity and the ability to evolve.
All the commercial varieties available to farmers in Europe are on the EU common catalog. To be listed there, a variety has to be stabilized. And a stabilized variety no longer evolves. But to adapt to local conditions, we need evolving varieties. That’s why people turn to old ones — not out of nostalgia or romanticism, but out of pragmatism. These varieties allow for farmer-led selection.
Farmer selection means constant adaptive selection. Farmers readapt varieties to their environment in situ, directly in the field. This creates extraordinary genetic diversity and vitality that evolves much faster than anything industry can deliver.
Take maize, for example. Maize isn’t really suited to Europe. Overall, it doesn’t use more water than wheat — actually a bit less over its whole cycle. But the problem is timing: maize needs water in summer, wheat needs it in spring. In living soils, with good organic or ecological practices, wheat usually finds the water it needs in spring because the soil organic matter retained it from winter rains. But in summer, even the best soil doesn’t hold enough water. So growing maize in Europe without irrigation is basically absurd.
And yet, it is possible to produce non-irrigated maize that resists drought and heatwaves. An association in Dordogne, Agro-Bio-Périgord, showed this, under the leadership of Bertrand Lassaigne — and I want to name him. He died two years ago in a motorcycle accident, but he was a pioneering, iconoclastic figure who did a lot to move agriculture forward.
They developed methods to breed organic, peasant maize — not hybrids, but population maize, pure lines combined into populations, like a “herd” of maize. Today, these varieties resist drought and have adapted to European conditions. And this was achieved fairly quickly, in 10 to 15 years.
If farmers had more resources to practice their own seed selection — which current regulations make very difficult — we would already have many solutions to face climate change.
We’ve talked a lot about agronomic practices, but unfortunately, changing those alone isn’t enough. The whole agri-food chain has to be rethought as well. In your view, what are the main challenges beyond the fields that we need to tackle in order to support the agroecological transition?
The first challenge, which seems obvious but isn’t always analyzed in all its complexity, is access to land.
To quickly summarize what Tanguy Martin said in the previous episode: today there’s a serious issue of generational renewal in French and European agriculture. We need to make it possible for many new farmers to establish themselves on farms that make sense both socially and agronomically — what we might call “human-scale farms.” It’s a complex notion, not easy to pin down precisely, but the idea is to create farm units that are manageable and sustainable, where labor and organization are realistic.
It’s not so much about the number of hectares, but about the coherence of the farm unit — the ability to manage the workload, the cycles, the diversity of production. And it’s also about preventing land grabbing, about avoiding farms becoming so huge that no one can ever take them over.
The solution doesn’t have to be only small family farms. Today, we can imagine larger farms run collectively, under different types of cooperative or company structures, where people can share the work, take turns, have weekends and holidays, and develop complementary productions on the same farm. Those already exist in France, and have for quite a while. This is a crucial issue that really should fall under a national agricultural framework law or an ambitious public policy.
The second challenge is peasant seeds. This is absolutely fundamental. We won’t be able to respond to today’s ecological and food emergencies without massively scaling up farmer-led seed selection programs. That doesn’t mean excluding centralized breeding programs in public research centers or even among some private seed companies. But peasant selection has to be massively developed. It’s adaptive, it evolves, and it allows farmers to keep control over their tools, to adapt varieties to local conditions, and to build resilience against climate change.
Another big challenge is agricultural education and public policy. We need to state clearly that the horizon for agriculture today is organic. That doesn’t mean it’s the ultimate or final model, but given our current knowledge and needs, it’s the most coherent approach to stop biodiversity loss, limit water grabbing, and promote diversified farming systems — far removed from large, capital-intensive industrial farms. Politically, that means public support, investment, and agricultural training all need to move in that direction.
If we address land access, farmer-led seed selection, and organic production seriously, we’ll already be solving a huge part of the problem. But then there’s the question of supply chains. Today, organic farming carries enormous subversive power: farmers who switch to organic love it and don’t want to go back, even those coming from the industrial conventional model. Organic gives them back joy in their work, technical, intellectual, and economic autonomy. It’s a real source of happiness.
But at the scale of the agri-food economy, it’s still complicated. If organic remains limited to supermarket shelves, within a capitalist system that imposes prices, kickbacks, and standardization, it won’t work. To succeed, we need to break away from standardization, relocalize production, and allow territories to reclaim value instead of letting it flow to multinational shareholders. A major overhaul at that level will be necessary, because that’s where the future of agroecology really plays out — in our entire food system.
To end this conversation on a positive note, let me ask you: what gives you hope? Or perhaps you have an anecdote from a struggle, or some other examples you’d like to share?
I’ll be honest: right now, I feel a fair amount of pessimism. There was a period in France — starting in 1997–98 with Minister Louis Le Pensec — when things were moving forward. Agroecological progress continued for quite a while, no matter the political side, and there was real momentum in Europe as well. But since 2017 in France, and since 2020 in Europe, there’s clearly been a sharp, very negative turn. Everyone I talk to in the field tells me the same thing: we’re backsliding, moving backwards. It’s not exactly a time for celebration.
That said, there are still reasons to be hopeful. For me, one of the deepest sources of optimism comes from working on the history of industrial agriculture for my latest book. All the alternative models that have been developing over the last twenty, thirty, forty, even fifty years — which we used to think of as scattered experiments, almost anecdotal — actually share a powerful common thread.
You probably know the story of the hummingbird effect, the idea that if everyone does their small part, it can lead to big results. Many left-leaning intellectuals have dismissed that story, seeing those actions as too marginal, too local to matter, and especially blaming it for putting responsibility on individuals instead of addressing systemic causes.
But when you look closely, all these initiatives directly oppose the industrial dynamic. Peasant seeds go against centralized breeding. Movements like Terre de Liens, which recover land for small farmers, push back against land grabbing. Organic farming relies on diversification, de-standardization, and the value of coherent, resilient systems. AMAPs, by recreating a direct link between producers and consumers, rebuild territorial roots. And there are many more examples.
All of these initiatives, which once seemed scattered, actually share the same logic: re-territorialization and diversification — in other words, the exact opposite of industrial centralization. In reality, without necessarily theorizing it, the peasant world has already begun to implement the counter-model to industrial agriculture.
What remains now is for these diverse initiatives to recognize their unity and work more closely together. And what makes me optimistic is that organizations like Via Campesina, on the international level, are precisely working in that direction. That, I think, is truly a reason for hope.
Do you have any resources you’d recommend — books, podcasts, documentaries — for those who want to keep exploring these themes?
Well, not out of egocentrism, but simply because I’ve worked on these issues and published a few books myself. My most recent one, Industrial Agriculture (Agriculture industrielle), really digs into the political and historical understanding of these dynamics. And one of my earlier books, Farming That Heals the Planet (Une agriculture qui répare la planète), goes deeper into the technical dimensions.
Among recent French books I find particularly interesting, there’s Stéphane Foucart’s And the World Fell Silent (Et le monde devint silencieux), which refers back to Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring. There’s also Nicolas Legendre’s Silence in the Fields (Silence dans les champs).
I’d also mention a graphic novel by Inès Léraud. She’s published several, but her latest, created with Léandre Mandard and Pierre Van Hove, is titled Battlefields: The Buried History of Land Consolidation (Champs de Bataille, l'histoire enfouie du remembrement).
Then there’s the work of historian Jean-Philippe Martin, who’s written extensively on the history of agriculture. His recent book Peasant Women: A History of Women’s Struggles in Agriculture (Paysannes. Histoire de la cause des femmes dans le monde agricole) is, in my view, essential for revisiting the role of women — too often made invisible — in peasant history.
As for films, there are some that aren’t exactly new but still carry weight: Tomorrow (Demain) by Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent, or The Harvests of the Future (Les moissons du futur) by Marie-Monique Robin, which lays some very solid foundations for reflection.
And staying with the question of women in agriculture, I’d like to highlight another graphic novel, Where’s the Boss? (Il est où le patron?), by Maud Bénézit and the collective Les paysannes en polaire. It offers a very sharp perspective on the place of women in French agriculture today.
Finally, for those who want to go further, there are networks like the National Federation of Organic Agriculture (Fédération Nationale d’Agriculture Biologique, FNAB), or the InPACT Collective, which brings together many peasant organizations. And of course, the broader international work of La Vía Campesina and, in France, the Confédération Paysanne.
Altogether, I think that’s already plenty to dive into!