Agricultural engineering graduates from the elite AgroParisTech university have called for fellow students to join them in deserting the agro tech industry. They want to use their skills to build a different kind of agriculture, more collaborative, more respectful of the environment and society.
France, the EU’s largest agricultural producer, has developed its huge agribusiness industry thanks to intensive farming, pesticides and innovative technology.
Figures for the agri-food industry show that in 2020 some 15,479 companies generated 198 billion euros and employed more than 433,000 people.
As former agriculture minister Edgard Pisani famously said: “If consumers wanted red milk and square tomatoes, French agriculture would know how to provide it.”
The industry relies on big brains to tackle the 21st century challenges of balancing out productivity with sustainability under the heavy cloud of climate change.
Many of those bright minds graduate from AgroParisTech, an exclusive university devoted to the life, food and environmental sciences.
But at this year’s graduation ceremony, eight of the 400 or so freshly qualified engineers turned their backs on the industry they were destined to join.
“We don’t want to pretend to be proud and deserving of a diploma for studies that have pushed us to take part in social and ecological devastation," said Lola Keraron during a seven-minute speech in which she and her colleagues explained why they were swerving away from the world of agribusiness.
"We don’t see ourselves as 'talent' working for a sustainable planet … We see that agribusiness is waging a war on the living world and against farmers everywhere on earth."
The students rejected the idea of "green growth" and that climate change could be solved through technology.
The university, they said, was educating hundreds of students every year to work in "destructive" and "harmful" jobs that involved "tampering with plants in laboratories for multinationals that are increasingly enslaving farmers".
'Inspirational' generation
A video of their speech published on YouTube has been viewed more than 900,000 times.
It was retweeted by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the hard-left France Unbowed party. "Listen to this. The biggest hope. That the new generation 'deserts' the absurd and cruel world we live in," he wrote.
François Gemmene, a contributor to the latest IPCC report on climate change, described the speech as "exceptionally inspirational" and a sign of growing malaise in top universities.
"A lot of students came to thank us, grateful that someone had finally said it," says Gwenn, one of the "deserters", adding that even the director had congratulated them.
In a cleverly worded statement, the university said it had "fulfilled its mission" to help students "choose the direction they’d like to give to their studies and their professional career".
Rejecting the system
The deserters are less kindly towards their school, and denounce its deepening ties with industry.
"A lot of the lessons were oriented to make us believe that agro industry can have solutions to the current crisis [but] it’s actually doing more harm than good," Gwenn tells RFI.
"It’s following the logic of profits for shareholders, for powerful people in society, and it’s not acting in the interests of society and the environment."
The industry’s interests are well represented in the university itself, she adds, with staff doing research for big companies.
"Some things in the school are funded by these big companies and private groups so for them it must seem normal that they can come to the school to make their propaganda."
Listen to a conversation with Gwenn in the Spotlight on France podcast
Selfish and irresponsible
The deserters, however, have their detractors. They've been mocked on social media as Amish types, turning their back on modernity and science.
Trashing their diplomas and training is seen as irresponsible, even selfish.
In an interview with Les Echos, a business daily, AgroParisTech’s director appeared to change tack, criticising what he viewed as the students' fatalism and desire to retreat from society.
"He was warning us that we have a responsibility as engineers to do something about world hunger, that deserting and going to cultivate carrots in the mountains is not a solution," Gwenn says. "But that’s not what we're saying at all."
Their call to desert is in fact accompanied by a call to engage.
The deserters are using their skills and knowledge to advance other more collaborative forms of agriculture and ways of living: beekeeping, collective farming projects, anti-nuclear activism and fighting construction on farming land.
Gwenn is developing her activities on a ZAD (zone to defend) near Nantes, in Brittany, where she moved a couple of years ago.
Green activists first occupied the area in Notre-Dame-des-Landes in the early 2010s to stop farmland, rich in biodiversity, being used to build an airport.
The project was abandoned but has remained a zone of resistance where people have developed an anti-capitalist lifestyle.
Some say that's too radical.
But Gwenn says the kind of projects they oppose – cement factories, pesticides, factory farms, nuclear plants – are even more so.
In France every nine years soil from land the size of a small region is removed and replaced with concrete, she says. "To me this is extremely radical."
Change from within?
Proponents of agribusiness say that given the extent of global warming and its impact on food production, France needs agricultural engineers more than ever. Change from within the industry makes more sense, they say.
"We’ve talked a lot about this and we believe that when you try to change the system from the inside the system changes you," Gwenn says.
"We aren't telling people to just disappear somewhere up the mountains in isolation, we're actually calling to fight against the system.
"We can put our knowledge and our intelligence to fight against the ... huge projects that are destroying land or destroying people."
A particularly critical article in Le Point suggested the deserters were part of a "nihilist fever" sweeping through France.
"We’re not nihilist. It gives us energy to believe that we can emancipate ourselves and encourage others to emancipate themselves from the techno-industrial system to build something new."
