Une crise agricole mais quelle crise?

The article analyzes agricultural crises, highlighting their specific nature: beyond classic economic mechanisms, they directly affect food security and sovereignty, often triggering social and political tensions. Their causes include climate shocks, animal and plant diseases, global price fluctuations, rising input costs, and structural issues such as rural exodus, aging farmers, and soil degradation. Historically, agricultural crises have alternated between overproduction (price collapse, bankruptcies, waste) and underproduction (famine, malnutrition). Industrialization and mechanization boosted productivity but also increased dependence on capital and global markets, leaving many producers vulnerable. The current crisis (2023–2024) is part of a broader European wave of farmers' mobilizations. Their demands concern low incomes, heavy taxation, unfair competition, the burden of environmental regulations, and a call for recognition. This crisis is as much moral and cultural as economic, reflecting the end of the post-war productivist model. Price support policies, such as the CAP's guaranteed prices, once secured farmers' income and boosted production, but led to costly and environmentally damaging overproduction. Today, the proposal of minimum prices re-emerges, but raises concerns about competitiveness, consumer costs, and perverse effects. Alternative solutions include targeted subsidies, quality-based regulation, and support for agroecological transition. In conclusion, today's agricultural crisis is systemic—economic, climatic, social, and cultural. It signals the end of a cycle and an opportunity to reinvent a sustainable agricultural model that reconciles food security, social justice, and ecological transition.