[THS] Ecologist: What's the real environmental cost of the French baguette?

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http://www.theecologist.org/investigations/food_and_farming/762560/whats_the_real_environmental_cost_of_the_french_baguette.html

Special investigation What's the real environmental cost of the French baguette?

Carolyn Lebel

8th February, 2011
Water in France's 'breadbasket' - where much of the wheat used to make the iconic
baguette is grown - is under threat from industrial agriculture, with excessive
consumption and contamination by pesticides and nitrates. Carolyn Lebel reports...

To look at the ingredients, the making of a French baguette is child’s play: about five
parts flour to three parts water, some yeast and a dash of salt. But in France, baking
bread is something of an art form and probably best left in the hands of the country’s
vast network of artisan-bakers. Every year, about two million tons of crusty loaves
emerge from the hot ovens of some 34,000 boulangeries. And while bread may have
been relegated to a supporting role in the French national diet over the past century,
the average Frenchman still devours well over a half a baguette a day.

Just an hour’s drive southwest of Paris, an immense territory stretching over 7,500
square-kilometers produces much of the wheat that satisfies this appetite. It’s called
La Beauce, otherwise known as France’s breadbasket. Geographically close to Paris
and Versailles, La Beauce has always been linked to France’s political stability,
according to Steven Kaplan, an American historian specialized in bread and French
history.

The N-154 is a popular highway for lorries transporting goods of all sorts from
southern parts of France and Europe, to Paris and beyond. It runs through the heart
of the Beauce, slicing through vast fields of brown chiseled earth and grassy wheat
sprouts that stretch beyond the horizon on either side. This is no-nonsense rurality.
There are no quaint fences, hedges or weeds to delineate the motorway from the
endless sea of perfectly flat, monotonous farmland. For better or for worse, it seems
to say, agriculture has been taken out of the fickle hands of Mother Nature and into
the commands of global markets and industry.

Seen from above on a crisp winter day, the region resembles a patchwork of yellow,
green and brown geometrical shapes, revealing vast monocultures of wheat,
rapeseed and barley – winter crops. What is not visible from this vantage point is a
massive underground water reserve that has allowed the region to emerge as the
highest-yielding cereal producer across France, and possibly Europe.

Water politics

The Beauce aquifer is one of Europe’s largest, with a holding capacity of some 20
billion cubic meters of water. It sits under six French departments (counties) and two
administrative regions (Centre and Ile-de-France), and feeds two major river
watersheds (the Loire and the Seine). Until the explosive development of irrigation in
the 60s, 70s and 80s, the aquifer had mainly been used to provide drinking water to
the region’s rural communities.

By the end of the 80s, a dense network of over 3,000 irrigation wells were pumping
water from the aquifer at a rate of between 60 to 250 million cubic meters per year.
Where once crops traditionally grown in the region had relied on the winter season’s
abundant rains for nourishment, new varieties of spring and summer crops - sugar
beets, corn, potatoes, peas and green beans - were now being cultivated, flourishing
under gushing showers of Beauce’s subterranean waters.

The development of irrigation in the region also attracted food manufacturers and
sugar refineries which forged tightly regulated contracts with Beauce farmers. Liberal
access to irrigation was as much a contractual obligation for companies such as
McCain Foods as the ability to produce potatoes of a predetermined shape and size to
fit easily into factory machinery.

Finite resources

Irrigation made annual precipitation cycles inconsequential. The skies had once
dictated the annual fate of agricultural output in the Beauce, as elsewhere, but now
farmers could look down to the blue gold under their feet.

Unlimited access to water, a small selection of high-yielding crop varieties and liberal
use of synthetic fertilisers meant that farmers could now produce 90-100 quintals
(approximately 9000 - 10,000 kilograms) per hectare, according to Lionel Vilain, an
agronomist with France Nature Environnement, an environmental protection agency.
Conventional yields are closer to 60-80 quintals (6000 - 8000 kilograms) per hectare.

This sense of productivism became a part of the culture. 'For many years, the local
press would publish articles promoting the record for the highest producer of the
year. It became a sort of competition,' Bernard Rousseau, head of the Water Network
with France Nature Environment, told The Ecologist. 'It was also in the interests of
some very influential people in the region to promote this kind of mentality.'

But a succession of dry winters in the early 1990s combined with the powerful
pumping capacity of thousands of irrigation wells dropped the aquifer to its lowest
level on record in 1994, according to Pascal Billault, a hydro-geologist with the Loire-
Bretagne water agency. Until then, the volume of water used by irrigating farmers
had almost never exceeded 250 million cubic meters. In 1991 however about 420
million cubic meters were siphoned for agriculture. Combined with the 100 million
cubic meters required for tap water and industry, the well was essentially bottoming
out.

Legal action

The Beauce is not without its beauty. In the picturesque valley of la Conie, host to a
conservation site and bird sanctuary, a river by the same name became the centre of
a legal battle in 1992 when the Conie River simply dried up. One hundred and fifty
locals formed an association and took the territorial government to court for failing to
protect the river, fed by the Beauce aquifer. The association won some charges and
lost others. But ultimately it was the start of a delicate political process that continues
today to reign in the hefty demands of agriculture on the aquifer.

Territorial governments began issuing ad hoc restrictive measures, including limiting
the number of days during which farmers were allowed to irrigate in the summer.
And in 2000, eight years after the Conie River affair, a highly political multi-
stakeholder commission (la Commission Locale de l’Eau, 'CLE'), was formed to
negotiate quotas on water with Beauce irrigators.

The negotiation process was made all the more complex by the 'multiplicity of actors'
with legitimate stakes in the aquifer, says Olivier Petit, a French economist specialized
in water governance. The 70-odd person CLE commission included state
representatives from the six departments and two regions, from the two water
agencies, from agricultural unions and chambers, from local industry and
environmental organisations. Ultimately, an inherent complicity between elected
officials in the region and a dominant agricultural sector meant that, despite its sheer
size and diversity, agricultural interests weighed in heavily in the commission.
Negotiations were tough, says Rousseau, but the rules that came out of the process
were weak.

However, the governance system put in place to protect the aquifer is a first of its
kind in France. Water meters, financed through the water agencies, have since been
installed on all of the irrigation pumps in the region. And farmers have begrudgingly
been keeping records of their water use for state administrators.

'Farmers accept it as necessary evil,' says Philippe Lirochon, President of the Eure et
Loir department’s Chamber of Agriculture. For the aquifer is not exempt from another
dry spell. A study carried out by Sami Bouarfa, an irrigation specialist with the
Cemagref environmental research institute, found that, were quotas to be reduced
significantly, the operational model put in place by farmers would become obsolete.
'It would mean a return to winter crops, requiring a whole other system than the one
that has been put in place progressively over the past 40 years.' The fate of the
region’s economy has become inherently tied to the aquifer.

Poisoned water

While the CLE commission was preoccupied with cubic meters and quotas, an
alarming public health crisis was slowly unfolding across the region, and most
profoundly in the Eure et Loir department. On May 5th, 2005, a daily paper ran a
short news piece with the headline 'One in five Euréliens drinks non-potable water.
Beneath the headline was a series of maps from 1980 to 2003 depicting the rapid
spread of nitrate contamination from synthetic fertilisers in the Beauce aquifer. In
July 2008, after a nine-month ban on drinking tap water in one village, the mayor of
Cormainville was forced to broaden the restriction to water for cooking.

Recent statistics from the Regional Health Agency reveal that about 40,000 people -
10 per cent of the region’s population, mainly in the smallest villages - receive water
that is unfit for human consumption, due to nitrate and pesticide contamination.
Unborn babies and newborns are most at risk from nitrates, which are linked a
condition called the 'blue baby syndrome'. Health risks associated with pesticides vary
widely depending on the chemicals involved and type and frequency of exposure,
but can, in some cases, include cancer and damage to the nervous system.

Part of the plan put in place to contain the looming public health crisis included a
decision to abandon half of the department’s most contaminated wells, and create of
a network of pipelines to link up the villages. Were it not for these measures, which
Gilles Deguet, Vice President of the Regional Council, acknowledges as temporary
fixes, 40 per cent of the department would now be stuck with non-drinkable water.
New wells must drill deeper and deeper to access clean water, but sooner or later
'the pollution catches up with you,' says Deguet.

Residents of the city of Dreux already pay almost twice as much for tap water than
the average French citizen. And it’s expected that the cost of water in the
department will triple over the next decade. Like the wells, somebody will have to dig
deeper and deeper into their pocketbook, but it is unlikely to be the farmers
responsible for the pollution. Contrary to the EU’s 'polluter-pays' directive, about 80
per cent of the fees collected by the water agencies come from residents.

Jean-Claude Schmidt, who is responsible for the Eure & Loir department’s water
services, has the impossible job of trying to convince farmers in the vicinity of the
department’s 40 most important water collection points to change their ways. A
perimeter of 1,000 to 7,000 hectares around each collection point has been drawn,
corresponding to the area within which rainwater drains into the aquifer. In these
'catchment zones', the idea goes, grassland buffers that soak up nitrates, and all
round greener agricultural practices, will be cultivated. Should the plan work about
100,000 hectares - almost 25 per cent of the region’s agricultural lands - could
benefit from environmental protection measures.

Exacerbating pollution

The idea is not a new one. About two decades ago, Nestlé Water’s Vittel brand of
bottled water found it necessary to invest heavily in repurchasing agricultural lands
around their springs and co-opting local farmers to adopt greener practices in order
to safeguard their product from agricultural pollution. But the public funds allocated
to Schmidt’s daunting task can hardly compete with those of a private company like
Vittel. 'When the price of wheat took off this year, we weren’t able to keep up. The
compensations farmers were demanding were just too high,' says Schmidt.

A bullish wheat market does more than price environmental protection measures out
of the market. It exacerbates pollution. Vilain describes an almost linear relationship
between crop prices and the use of fertiliser and pesticides. In a bid to boost yields,
'when wheat prices are high, they use more fertiliser. From the rational economic
perspective of a businessman, it pays to pollute,' he says.

If there’s something environmentalists and farmers can agree on, it’s that any long-
term solution starts with economic considerations. While Vilain advocates a pan-
European tax on fertilisers and pesticides, Cyril Deshayes, who heads WWF-France’s
fresh water department, speaks of the purchasing power of the government - which
buys significant quantities of food for schools and hospitals - to establish contracts
with organic farmers and create a more favourable marketplace for organic food.
Whatever the tactic, says Lirochon, 'We must maintain the economic balance of our
farming enterprises, while responding to our obligation to consider the impacts of
agricultural pollution on water.

Inertia?

As nitrate and pesticide molecules continue to percolate into the aquifer with no sign
of abate, there’s one word on the lips of experts. Inertia. Once here, the molecules
will remain for a very long time. According to recent study conducted in the
neighbouring Seine watershed, a full-scale conversion to organic agriculture is
theoretically the only way to bring nitrogen contamination back in check, a scenario
that Gilles Billen, co-author of the study calls 'utopian'.

But there’s another kind of inertia that characterises this crisis, and it is human. For
all the plant life that Beauce farmers nurture on their lands year after year, they then
go and foul the element that is the very essence of all life, say critics. But it’s easy to
blame the farmers. Others are to blame too – from agro-chemical companies to EU
policy makers. 'You just had to look at a map of agricultural pollution in France,' says
Rousseau, 'to see how it maps up with European subsidies.'

Meanwhile, an officially sanctioned recipe for 'traditional' French bread reads: 'Flour
is the most important ingredient. Its quality is a baker’s first consideration... water is
used to bind the flour particles together. Without it, kneading is impossible. Water
must be potable, non-mineralized and with little chlorine, which would otherwise
hinder fermentation...'

France’s breadbasket may abound in wheat and flour, but it has forgotten the
ingredient that - quite simply - holds it all together.

Carolyn Lebel is a freelance journalist, in Paris.