French land agency reduces €1m field sale to €15,000

A spectacular case in which a 1.7-hectare field in Brittany was due to be sold for €1million to a property developer before its price was cut to €15,000 has highlighted the role of government agency Safer in rural affairs.

The mayor of Saint-Grégoire (Ille-et-Vilaine), who was opposed to the sale, asked the local Safer agency to intervene in April.

Safer determined the lower price by confirming the land was agricultural and could not be built on. As a consequence, the vendor withdrew from the sale.

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What is Safer?

Safer (Les Sociétés d'aménagement foncier et d'établissement rural) is a not-for-profit public limited company created in 1960, under the supervision of the Ministries of Agriculture and Finance. 

Its initial mission was to ensure that farms were organised on a rational basis, and to help young farmers purchase them, by intervening when land was put up for sale.

However, by insisting that all land sales went through Safer, it quickly developed a bad reputation in many rural areas where sales were traditionally arranged through families and other local networks.

In wine-growing areas in particular, a loophole was often used whereby companies were formed before sales, by the sellers and buyers, to limit Safer’s role.

Now Safer says its role has expanded beyond farming to help other groups, including artisans and service providers, install themselves in rural areas.

There are 17 regional Safers, with 1,100 staff and 4,500 local representatives, most of whom are municipal councillors or elected farmers’ union members.

The regional bodies are overseen by a federal headquarters in Paris.

Local committees have the power to call in anyone involved in rural matters to give advice, as with the Saint-Grégoire case, before sending decisions to Paris, where they are almost always accepted by the ministries.

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Revitalising rural life

Officially, Safer now has four missions, the first of which is still to revitalise rural life by helping young farmers and consolidating land for easier working. As well as agricultural land, woods and forests also now fall under its remit. 

In addition, it helps with local development initiatives by working through local councils and responding to requests for land from people with projects in rural areas.

In response to criticism about the environmental impact of some Safer farm consolidations, the body now has a third mission to act in favour of the environment, ensuring the countryside is preserved. 

Environmental action extends to flood and other natural risk-prevention measures, and ensuring there are diverse “means of production” in rural areas to build economic resilience.

Safer’s fourth mission is to regulate rural land prices, which it does mainly through a website that gives both broad stroke prices for arable land, vines, woods and rural houses, as well as prices in individual communes.

Safer is charged with giving the government information on rural prices, and informing local mairies of land sales in the commune which they might not be aware of. 

'Rural transactions hold-up'

* In March, the Fédération nationale des agents immobiliers (FNAIM) referred Safer to the European Commission for “abuse of a dominant position”. 

FNAIM president Loïc Cantin claims its right of pre-emption has widened to such an extent it is causing “a real hold-up on rural transactions carried out for valuable consideration in this country”.

For its part, Safer insists that speculative sales drive up the price of all other land, and some farmers can no longer afford to buy.