Transformations in agriculture, food production and consumption 2024 Edition
In this new edition of the Insee Références collection, INSEE and the Department of Statistics and Foresight Analysis of the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty present an overview of the main changes in French agriculture over the last 50 years: concentration and specialisation of farms since 1970, comparison of the economic performance of organic farming with that of conventional farming, changes in food consumption over the last decade and, finally, the environmental issues to which agriculture is contributing and which it must address.
1970-2020: fewer, larger and more specialised farms than the territories
Jean-Noël Depeyrot, Mickaël Hugonnet (Department of Statistics and Foresight Analysis)
Since the middle of the 20th century, French farms have undergone major restructuring. The number of farms decreased, while their average surface area increased. In the same time, farms became more specialised. Today, utilised agricultural area is unevenly distributed between farms, with 5% of them using 25% of it. However, these inequalities have not increased in recent decades. On the contrary, the concentration of the labour force has increased: 25% of farms alone use 61% of the agricultural labour force, compared with 49% in 1970. Furthermore, farms are keeping to be more specialised: 35% of them have only one economically significant production, compared with 19% in 1988. Diversity of productions in the territories, which still remains, is no longer the result of farms that are themselves diversified, as it used to be. It is now the result of farms that are highly specialised, but in different types of production.