Ministère de l'agriculture et de l'alimentation
A 1.3% growth for the turnover of agrofood industry. Firms suffer from the 1.9% fall of their exports after an exceptional 1997. Investments decrease by 3.6% but salaried employment continues its recovery, together with a sustained development of temporary work.
Bass, sea bream and turbot farming produced 5,500 tons in 1997, i.e. more than the quantities of the same fishes unloaded by French fishery. Sea pisciculture is practised by 46 companies which make 307 millions turnover. They export nearly half of their production, and all of them employ permanent workers.
In 1998, the agricultural result of wine-growing holdings rose by 18%. The results of farms specialised in fruits and vegetables also went up. Conversely, it dropped by 30% in the granivore breedings because of the pork price fall. It declined in most field cropping departments specialised in cereals. The income of dairy or meat cattle breeding increased except in zones of extensive breeding.
In 1997, there are 5550 forest farms, or 19% fewer than in 1986. Half of them harvest less than 1000m3 a year. Three out of four are specialized in one type of product : sawlogs, industrial wood or fuelwood. Two out of three employ no salaried workers.
Nearly 20,000 communes do not have any local shops on their territory in 1998. But most are supplied by substitute services. Bread and frozen food services are most commonly provided. Meat and grocery supplies are less ordinary. Substitute services are becoming scarce, especially in communes that never had a store or lost it long ago.
Less favoured agricultural zones cover 47% of French territory. They include more than 60% of the woodlands and pastures, but only 27% of the arable land. In these zones, as in the rest of the country, woods and forests predominate and are expanding to the detriment of pasture land. There, agricultural farm incomes are among the lowest.
The trout farming sector has seen a number of mergers since 1991. In 1997, it produced 47000 tons of fish, or 16% more than in 1991 with a smaller number of firms. These firms more and more often practice slaughter and carving which bring an added value to the farming.
The surpluses of nitrogen ofagricultural origin have increased between 1995 and 1997 because of an extension of cultivated acreages and of a rise in quantities of mineral nitrogen used per hectare. But the use of organic nitrogen has decreased thanks to a reduction in the beef population. The strongest nitrogen surpluses remain localised in Brittany and in the field cropping areas of the Paris Basin.
In 1997, farms covered by the Farm Accountancy Data Network record a progression of their current pre-tax income of 3.3% (a concept close to the Family farm income). That good general result masks a great dispersion of individual data, in level as well as in evolution. It is especially marked for farms specialised in crop productions.
Ministère de l'agriculture et de l'alimentation