Abstract
Abstract This article describes the actions taken by the National Federation of Organic Farming (FNAB) to try to influence the course of organic agriculture's development in France. This federation wields the strength that accrues from its network of regional associations, but has no direct control over the economic actions of farmers and enterprises in the organic sector. It is trying to influence these actions in three different ways. First, it is drawing up a normative framework, a stabilised discourse about the risks that are linked to the current strong growth of the market and about the economic model and values that it wants to defend in this context. Second, the FNAB tries to affect the ways that the food supply chains are organised by promoting certain production and trade organisation schemes. Third, the FNAB produces information and references to help farmers and economic operators get their market bearings.
Highlights
The French organic farming sector has been marked by very strong growth over the past ten years
We firstly focused on FNAB’s public discourse and analysed a large corpus of documents produced by the federation since 2010
The FNAB talks about a “change in scale” to describe the strong growth and current reconfigurations of the organic sector, and its vision of the threats and challenges related to these changes
Summary
The French organic farming sector has been marked by very strong growth over the past ten years. We shall study how the French National Federation of Organic Farming (FNAB) tries to influence the economic functioning of the organic sector in order to bend the trajectory of the development of organic farming in France and to avoid some of the pitfalls of conventionalisation. Examining the actions undertaken by the FNAB network to bend the trajectory of organic economy is interesting How does this federation, which has no control over either economic or regulatory activities, try to affect the path taken by organic agriculture in France?. In the last part we shall come back to our original question and wonder if one national producers’ organisation such as the FNAB can influence the economic actions and bend the trajectory of the French organic sector’s development
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