Jean-Yves Pailleux

Les chemins pour durer en élevage ovin pastoral des Cévennes

Because of unpredictable global markets, policy changes, and increasing climatic disturbances, livestock farmers must plan their systems and their dynamics by integrating uncertainty about future conditions if they are to hold firm. The vulnerability (Chambers, 2006) of farming systems and the abruptness of changes seem greater in the South, because of weak mechanisms and the absence of any kind of incentives, in particular protection or regulation policies. But action under uncertainty (Lemery et al., 2005) is also the subject of increasing questioning in the North, including Europe, because of evolutions in the Common Agricultural Policy and vagueness about the reforms to come. Under these conditions of uncertainty, on what bases can farmers hold on in agriculture, how can they last? The question of the “paths to last” has been producing a great deal of literature not only in the agricultural sector, but also beyond agriculture in the corporate world (e.g. Mignon, 2001). The concept of “path of development” (Evans, 2009) gave rise to many variations in the field of analysis of farming system dynamics. Structural evolutions, production orientations and technical configurations are formalized (Cialdella et al., 2009; Moulin et al., 2008; Ryschawy et al., 2012). In some of these studies, explicit account is taken of links to the farming family (Rueff et al., 2011), the dynamic of change in systems of activities, collectives and forms of work organization, with vertical (family line) and horizontal (the couple) methods of family influence on structural and technical evolutions (Terrier, 2013; Terrier et al., 2012). Another approach consists of updating the principles and their combinations (long-term action logics) on which farmers rely to develop their farms in their own context (Dedieu, 2009). These principles can be expressed as elements of a deliberate or emerging (Moulin et al., 2001) strategy of farm evolution patterns.