Assesmeny of public policies on agri-food and the environment[L'évaluation des politiques publiques de l'agro-alimentaire et de l'environnement]

In France, public policy evaluation is the legacy of the Commissariat Général au Plan (General Commission for Planning), created after the Liberation in January 1946 to respond to the ‘urgent need' for planning that would enable the country to ‘escape the dictatorship of the moment'. The purpose of public policy evaluation is to identify the most effective levers for achieving the objectives set by public action. For the French agri-food complex, these objectives have historically been those of food self-sufficiency and then ‘export orientation', only to be gradually called into question when the negative environmental impacts on natural resources of the agro-industrial model combining technical modernisation of production, standardisation of processing and segmentation of consumer markets became apparent. Due to the multifunctionality of agriculture, it remains difficult to analyse the relationship between agriculture and the environment in terms of externalities. Assessing the environmental impacts of agriculture remains difficult to quantify, particularly the relationship between the financial incentives received by farmers for environmental services and the ‘value' of the environmental externalities generated by productive activities.