The difficult match between a territorial policy instrument and the industry-centred tradition of French agricultural policies: the Land Management Contract (LMC)

Abstract

Between 1999 and 2002, the Land Management Contract (LMC) programme was the principal mechanism implemented by France in response to the demands of the European Rural Development Regulation. It was presented as a territorial policy instrument, at the service of sustainable development that set out to encourage the multifunctionality of agriculture. However, the mid-term evaluation of the programme revealed that its conditions of implementation did not make it possible to fully achieve these ambitions. While it may have helped to make the principle of the contractualization of subsidies more generally accepted and legitimized the notion of the environment as a criterion in the definition of agricultural policies, more often than not, the definition frameworks of these contracts were restricted to the agricultural sphere alone and their target public to the relatively limited fringe group of farmers who were already familiar with the workings of the departmental institutions in charge of agricultural development. This paper sets out to not only describe some of the limitations of this programme but also its positive repercussions. Both are important factors if we want to approach national and European agricultural policy in terms of territorialization and with due consideration for rural development issues. The LMC was the main instrument of the Agriculture Framework Law of 1999 that embodied a ‘new approach to the management of public action’ via a policy that ‘takes into account the economic, environmental and social functions of agriculture and participates in land management with a view to sustainable development’, as stipulated by the first article of the Agriculture Framework Law of 9 July 1999.