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New Skills. The new farm legislation creates a "collectivization" agency−as traditionalists scoffingly call it−with power to buy and resell at reasonable prices all land that comes on the market, plus most of some 11 million idle acres whose ownership is in dispute* the agency will have authority to designate maximum and minimum sizes for new farms, thus protecting peasants simultaneously against cumulards and morcellement. To help farmers get higher prices, the new law allows them to set up cooperatives, regional wholesale centers and local marketing boards. And to weed out marginal farms, the government offers farmers better and earlier pensions (at 65), will also pay to retrain them in other skills.
France, which already has half of all the arable land area in Europe's Common Market, aims thus to raise productivity and sell its big annual farm surplus (notably wheat, sugar beet, meat) to Western Europe's two biggest food importers: West Germany and Britain (if and when it joins the Common Market). The knottiest problem facing Agriculture Minister Pisani is still the French farmer−who would rather depend on high price supports than high productivity, and may stubbornly resist the new legislation. As Pisani knows, no government in history has ever successfully defied the French peasant.
* In which the peasants revolted against high taxes and oppression, pillaged and massacred until the insurrection was crushed by Charles the Bad.
* The new body is known as SAFER (Societe d'Etablisscments Foncieres et d'Economie Rurale).