Green Acres or, les Hectares Verts

Où Eva et moi voulons être

I suspect that I’m like most people in North America in having my vision of France defined by three movies: An American in Paris (Or Werewolf, or Emily); The French Connection; and A Year in Provence. Once again I’ve been misled.

Paris and Marseilles do not represent the reality of France, nor do the sunny tourist villages in the southeast corner of the country. The truth is that France is first and foremost a rural, farming country, with agriculture accounting for the vast majority of land use.

What’s more it’s mostly smaller farms, family farms, mixed agriculture farms, the likes of which have largely disappeared in North America. Whereas the banks and the big multinational agri-corporations have turned North American farming into a big, capital intensive capital-B Business sector, in France it still seems that family farmers can survive, and even thrive.

That sector of the economy is why you can’t drive more than 5 kilometers without passing through a tiny village or town, a town that invariably has a weekly farmers’ market, with stalls operated by honest-to-god farmers.

One clue that led us to understand the intensely rural nature of France was the surprising lack of really large cities. Canada, with a population of about 38 million has 5 cities with more than 1 million inhabitants, and 12 more with more than quarter-million people. Those 19 million people are half of everyone in Canada.

France, population 67 million, has exactly one city bigger than a million people - Paris, at half the size of Toronto - and only 9 cities bigger than a quarter million.

Even if you include cities bigger than 100,000 the urban French population only totals about 9.5 million. 6 out of every 7 French people still live in a small town.

That has to change people’s lifestyles. That may explain why things move slower in France, why big-box stores are the exception, not the rule, and why everywhere that you shop you see French produce and meats, and at a quality that the urban dwellers of Canada would never believe.

It may also explain why fibre-optic Internet is the norm in almost all places, and municipal water supplies instead of wells, and why the thousands of miles of two lane roads - and even single lane farm roads - are all in good repair, well designed, and well maintained.

At the end of the day though I’m now faced with one more perplexing question: how on earth did France manage to make this happen?