Why Are So Many French Farmers Taking Their Own Lives?

[Oscar]

Why Are So Many French Farmers Taking Their Own Lives?

[ http://narrative.ly/why-are-so-many-fre ... own-lives/ ]

By Jonathan Alpeyrie March 23, 2016

- - - -

According to a recent study, male farmers in France are twenty percent more likely to take their own lives than the rest of the population.

In February 2015, Louis Ganay contemplated suicide after a bank denied him a loan to keep his farm afloat.

- - - -

In an age of globalized agriculture, suicides have spiked among small farmers who are drowning in debt. Survivors speak out about what’s pushing so many to the brink.

Louis Ganay sits on his knees, alone in a massive farm building, holding a noose in one hand and looking up toward the high beam above him. It is late afternoon in February 2015 and Ganay, 35 years old, is holed up in the small cattle farm he runs near the village of Languidic in northwestern France. He is crying, wondering how things could have gone so wrong that he is ready to end his life. Already heavily in debt, just a few hours earlier the bank denied him another loan that could have kept his forty-cow operation afloat. Ganay thinks about his wife, who he called just a while ago to tell her what he is about to do. He thinks about the cows that he lovingly tends to each day. He considers the nation he feels has abandoned him. He places the noose around his neck and tightens it, ready to leave all of that behind.

A few seconds pass. Then, “an angel saved my life at the crucial moment,” Ganay explains. “As I was on my knees and ready to kill myself…I suddenly just stood up like a robot and started walking to where my cows were.” His wife ran up to the farm just a short time later and found him milking his beloved cows.

Ganay’s experience represents an increasingly familiar story across France. As farmers all over Europe struggle to make a living in the age of the industrialized factory farm, Jacques Jeffredo, a former farmer and activist, estimates that over 600 French farmers commit suicide each year. [ http://www.prieres-agriculture.com/ ] While that figure is higher than any official reports have demonstrated, the French Institute for Public Health Surveillance has found that male farmers were twenty percent more likely to take their own lives than the rest of the population [ http://www.france24.com/en/20131012-sui ... mers-study ] – a finding that increases with age, climbing to 47 percent above the national average for male farmers aged 55 to 64. Similar waves of farmer suicides have been reported in India and elsewhere in recent years. [ http://narrative.ly/graves-of-cotton/ ]

Farmers have been cultivating France’s rich soils for fifteen centuries, explaining the wide varieties of food found from region to region. Under Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, the country pursued policies that saw farmers’ profits increase and investments prosper. Yet in recent decades an array of trade treaties has left small French farmers at a loss to compete with global companies flooding cheap food into the country’s markets. French consumers can buy oranges from Spain, meat from New Zealand, apples from Peru, milk from Germany, pork from Romania. As in many other EU countries, the local farmer has often become dispensable to the local economy. Desperate farmers have repeatedly turned to protest as falling prices and increased competition have made earning a decent living more and more difficult to achieve. [ http://www.france24.com/en/20150902-fra ... ood-prices ]

For Ganay and hundreds of others, suicide at times seems the only solution.

MORE:

[ http://narrative.ly/why-are-so-many-fre ... own-lives/ ]