Helping migrant people to settle into agriculture and crafts in France
This spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. The central section is devoted to the recent Soil Assembly initiative, and develops some of the experiences, reflections and surveys gathered within this emerging network. Here Association A4 presents its commitment into helping and supporting migrant people to settle agricultural projects in France.
Behind the Association A4 (1) is a group of people in a precarious situation – mainly because of our administrative status as “undocumented” or “exiled” – who want to live with dignity and work in the agricultural or craft sectors in France. Our collective includes former bakers, farmers, welders and various members of popular education associations already involved in agricultural and food issues.
This is a challenging project, which faces increasing polarization between urban centers and outlying areas, between cities and countrysides, between those with and those without working papers, as well as the rise of the extreme right. But it also faces the agricultural decline affecting rural areas and the announced expansion of agro-industry in Europe, in addition to climate upheavals.
In light of these shared observations and common difficulties, experienced by both French farmers and artisans and people who are struggling to obtain official legal status, we are endeavoring to build networks on an equal footing (2) based on mutual aid and mutual needs. We don’t want charity. This is a fundamental condition for the project’s success: that we are considered farmers and craftspeople in our own right, and not simply as “beneficiaries”.
We stand at the intersection of immigration, anti-racism, peasant and environmental struggles. We are attempting to break down the barriers between militant worlds that, even when they share a common territory, never meet. Building a network doesn’t mean supplanting what already exists, but rather strengthening the mesh of solidarity and mutual aid, as we stand in the crossfire of several political issues.
Origin: reconnecting intimately with the earth
In the spring of 2020, the pandemic lockdown reminded us just how fragile and vulnerable outlying districts of Paris such as Saint-Denis are. But it also provided fertile ground for weaving links between various activist movements, particularly focused on reflections around food, land, subsistence farming, professional training and agricultural work. Meetings at the Notre-Dame-des-Landes ZAD (Zone À Défendre) in 2021, part of the “Reprise de terres” (3) project, initiated the process of creating A4.
The question immediately arose: under what conditions could we, people in exile, some of whom had no French papers, be trained and work in the countryside? In the city, many people with migratory backgrounds are forced to work in poorly-paid jobs: we are exploited – in construction, cleaning, security, cooking, etc. – so that we can support ourselves and our families back home. Beyond the question of work, there’s also the problem of housing, which is rarely available in decent conditions.
In the countryside, a number of us have also had complicated experiences. It’s often difficult to live there, because of social isolation and the constraints associated with travel and limited job opportunities. As in the city, the risks of exploitation exist in informal work situations, with the usual blackmail around papers, and threats by neighbors or employers of reporting us to the authorities in the event of conflict.
Some farmers find themselves in difficult situations: they face losing their vocation to work in farming/crafts, with fading institutional support and enormous administrative constraints, besides being heavily dependent on the market and banks. As a large number of farmers retire over the next decade, agro-industrial surfaces are already expanding.
We therefore feel it is essential to build a link between our experiences. We aim to open doors to the countryside, offering opportunities in crafts, agriculture and other fields. A4 aspires to be a bridge between urban and rural, to satisfy the need for rural settlements and to share skills.
Objectives: independence through training and work, against exploitation
A4’s objective is to provide hosting, training and access to work for people with or without papers, whether they live in the city or the countryside. Ultimately, we want to make it easier for people to set up farming businesses, whether in France or elsewhere. To meet this objective, we are looking for farmers and craftspeople who are ready to host, employ or pass on their skills, as well as land to settle on, training and financing for our activities. Our association is founded on three pillars: training, remuneration and regularization.
Often, farmers who are enthusiastic about hosting us have small farms, which don’t always generate enough income to establish an employment contract, at least on a full-time basis. This may mean thinking about setting up a business based on several activities, using employer groups, or other solutions that we are looking into to facilitate this mutual aid.
Several A4 members have worked on industrial farms in Andalusia and France, where we have experienced exploitation by the agro-industrial sector, a situation that is difficult to escape. This was also confirmed during our investigative trips to Brittany and Provence, where undocumented migrants are working on some of the biggest farms, performing repetitive tasks with no transmission or sharing of knowledge, and no rights. It’s a constant fact: our administrative situations keep us in a state of exploitation, in undignified living conditions (4).
In the wake of these deplorable observations, we set about investigating (5) and denouncing this increasingly racist and slave-like reality (6), by studying investigative techniques and collecting testimonies from those who remain in these situations.
Furthermore, we have established a hosting protocol, to help us identify places where we would like to train, or even eventually settle down, and to agree, with the people who host/employ us, on our mutual commitments and various other points. Our goal is to be independent in our work relationships, to mitigate abuse and the risks of exploitation, and to build together with our hosts the conditions for our emancipation. Achieving these objectives presupposes an organization that gives everyone a place, on an equal footing, while leaving the initiative to those most concerned.
Results and challenges
Currently, there are 15 of us behind the A4 project, and around a hundred people involved in specific working groups and local groups. We are determined to move forward together, however heterogenous the group, whatever each person’s level of understanding of French language or France’s administrative reality.
We’re also studying and developing care tools – for everything that concerns the life of a collective, decision-making, militant and social action, but also to combat systemic oppression, and in particular racism and sexism, in order to rise above the integrated and systemic behaviors that we all have, and better take care of each other, respecting ourselves and others.
In three years, there have already been about 60 placements (cannery training, cooking internships, seasonal work, bakery internships, truck farming, construction work…), 15 professional introductions, a network of about a hundred possible host sites, 3,000 m² of loaned greenhouses in Lannion (growing peanuts, peppers, pineapples; building a bread oven and a henhouse…), five investigative trips, five local groups in Grenoble, Lannion, St Affrique, Ile-de-France and Anjou.
We still have a long way to go: structuring the association, creating a legal guide to help people find work and regularize their situation, improving our hosting protocol, consolidating local groups, responding to new requests and supporting new dynamics… And we are also dreaming of greater autonomy: by setting up our own collective farm(s) to offer training, ensuring a bit of our subsistence and enabling some of us to settle down.
notes
(1) A4 website: http://www.a4asso.org
(2) See the film about our trip through the Limousin region of France in February 2022, D’égal à égal (41’39, subtitled in Fr, En, Es), here: https://vimeo.com/770515263
(3) Read a presentation of “Reprise de terres” in Terrestres, (https://www.terrestres.org/2021/07/29/reprise-de-terres-une-presentation/) or in Socialter, as guest editor of the issue « Ces terres qui se défendent »: https://www.socialter.fr/auteur/reprise-de-terres
(4) A study that shows the detached working conditions in the south of France: « Travailleurs détachés – les dessous d’une exploitation », article and podcast on 18 April 2023 at https://www.blast-info.fr
(5) https://a4asso.org/enquete/
(6) Karl Laske, « Travailleurs saisonniers du Maghreb: la FNSEA lance son propre business », 29 February 2024, at https://www.mediapart.fr