PLANTS PAGE

French recession: Farms feeling the pinch

French consumers are spending less on luxuries like strawberries and prunes

A year after French President Francois Hollande was elected, promising growth and jobs, the economy has slipped back into recession. As the BBC's Christian Fraser reports, economic problems are affecting rural workers as much as those in the city.

The Lot-et-Garonne region is home to the largest organic farming area in France, and at this time of year the fields are blooming.

But as in other regions, the local economy is withering in the face of the punishing eurozone crisis.

Patrick Jouy, an industrial strawberry farmer, has seen few of the benefits Mr Hollande promised a year ago.

Many of his pickers are Poles; others are Spaniards and the Portuguese, exiles from Europe's struggling economies.

Youth unemployment is 17% in the Lot, higher than the national average.

But French people are reluctant to take seasonal work, and Mr Jouy says he cannot risk giving out more expensive permanent contracts, particularly when France is in recession.

"It's been far more difficult under Mr Hollande," he says.

"Our consumers have less money in their pockets, they are not buying strawberries, and we the employers are paying more and more in social charges. And now even overtime is taxed."

The speciality of the region is plums. And the added value comes from prunes.

At Coufidou, a farming co-operative in Saint-Livrade-sur-Lot, they produce exquisite sugared and chocolate-coated prunes. They sell to Fortnum and Mason and the French luxury market.

Prices for the region's speciality, plums, have been cut due to the recession

But government figures show the sharpest decline in French spending power since 1984. And like most others, the farmers have been forced to adapt.

"Of course with the crisis, like everyone else, we have had to cut prices and search for new markets," says sales manager Semira Baffou.

"And yes we too have to think about our labour costs. It's difficult. Prunes are not like milk or potatoes, in lean times people can go without the luxuries."

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

We do believe in the programme Mr Hollande has set out”

End Quote Bernard Barrel French Socialist candidate

In neighbouring Villeneuve-sur-Lot, politics and the economy collide. The constituency belonged to Mr Hollande's former budget minister, Jerome Cahuzac, who resigned last month in disgrace after it was revealed he had stashed a fortune in a Swiss bank.

There is a by-election next month, an acid test for the beleaguered Socialist government.

The economic figures will compound the misery.

"Yes we worry about the recession," said Juliette Cazabat a fashion designer who was shopping in the local organic market.

"We have to support our local producers and encourage them to grow."
New currency
In recession people are turning against the euro, globalisation and the import of cheap foreign products.

In Villeneuve they have created their own currency. It is called the Abeille. One Abeille equals one euro. But it can only be spent on local produce and services.

It is 20 euros to be a member, but it is a non-profit initiative and any money raised is ploughed back into helping local businesses.

"We have 150 families who are using it," said Nicolas Queyreau, vice president of the Abeille group.

"And an increasing number of traders. You can pay for your haircut, you can eat in restaurants, and of course you can do your weekly shop. It creates a connection, a relationship between the consumer and their local producers."

The Socialist candidate, Bernard Barrel, who will run in the forthcoming election, is all about supporting local employers.

But on a visit to the town of Fumel and Metaltemple, a truck components factory, where shifts has been halved in recent months, he concedes it is not the best time to run for the governing party.

"But we do believe in the programme Mr Hollande has set out. He has implemented 40 of the 60 new initiative he set out," he says.

"This is only the first year. The effects are yet to be felt - but they will be."

They have time in the Lot, it is a slower pace of life, but all the problems France is accumulating are flowing into the region.

Suddenly recession threatens their cherished quality of life. Restoring it is the government's challenge, and not just for the people of the Lot-et-Garonne.



 CONIFERS PLANT



These distinctions are based primarily upon molecular studies that have clearly shown the Pinaceae to be sister to all other conifers, and for the latter group to be comprised of two sister clades, Araucariaceae + Podocarpaceae and Cupressaceae + Sciadopityaceae + Taxaceae; for details see Missouri Botanical Garden (2011).
Historically, some authors segregated the yews and plum-yews Order Taxales with two families, Cephalotaxaceae and Taxaceae; and it was also popular for a time to segregate the Cupressaceae into two families, Cupressaceae and Taxodiaceae; see Cupressaceae for relevant remarks. Many authors elevate the genus Phyllocladus, here assigned to the Podocarpaceae, to the rank of family, but molecular and morphological studies have provided increasing evidence against this interpretation.

Description

Conifers usually have needle-shaped or scalelike leaves, and nearly all are evergreen. They typically have straight trunks with horizontal branches varying more or less regularly in length from bottom to top, so that the trees are conical in outline. They are characterized by having staminate or pollen-producing cones; most also bear ovulate or seed-producing cones.
Almost all conifers form a vesicular-arbuscular mycorrhiza, but the species in the Pinaceae form ectomycorrhizas (Brundrett 2008).

Distribution and Ecology

Cosmopolitan, excepting polar regions, the highest mountains, the driest deserts, and a few oceanic islands. Species in the Pinaceae are almost entirely confined to the northern hemisphere, while the Podocarpaceae and Araucariaceae are most widespread in the southern hemisphere and tropical northern latitudes. The Taxaceae are very widespread, although nowhere abundant, in the northern hemisphere and a bit of the southern. Sciadopitys is only native in Japan. Some of the most widespread tree species in the world are found in the northern forests, where a handful of Larix, Picea and Pinus species circle the globe across Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska and Canada.

Big tree

The largest of all is Sequoiadendron giganteum, in the Cupressaceae. A hundred years or so ago the largest was probably Sequoia sempervirens, also in the Cupressaceae, but the finest stands in that species were all destroyed by the loggers long ago; only remnants remain. The third largest is Agathis australis, in the Araucariaceae. Here again the finest forests were taken by the loggers, and we can only speculate on how large some of the vanished giants were; they may have rivaled Sequoia and Sequoiadendron. Pseudotsuga menziesii representing the Pinaceae, Podocarpus totara representing the Podocarpaceae, and Taxus sumatrana representing the Taxaceae are all distinctly impressive trees. Little Sciadopitys verticillata representing the Sciadopityaceae, on the other hand, seldom attracts much attention.

Oldest

The Great Basin bristlecone pine, Pinus longaeva, can live nearly 5,000 years and is the undisputed champion. It is often described as the oldest living thing. Ages of over 3,000 years have been shown for Fitzroya cupressoides and Sequoiadendron giganteum, both in the Cupressaceae, and there are probably more really ancient trees in the Cupressaceae than in any other family. Next up is the Podocarpaceae; the Huon pine, Lagarostrobos franklinii, can live for 2,500 years. None of the other families have species that have been proven to live over 1,000 years, but such ages are probably achieved by Taxus baccata in the Taxaceae, and by Agathis australis and Araucaria araucana in the Araucariaceae. I should mention that Taxus baccata could reasonably be expected to live a very, very long time - thousands of years - but it lives by growing at the cambium while dying at the heart, so that a tree might grow in one place for a thousand years and yet not have any wood in it more than a few hundred years old. Does this make the tree a thousand years old?

Dendrochronology

A great many species have received attention, and in fact, unless someone has done some work with ginkgo (I haven't heard of it), conifers are the only gymnosperms that have received attention from dendrochronologists.

Ethnobotany

Conifers are one of the world's most important renewable resources. Most economic and cultural exploitation concerns members of the families Pinaceae and Cupressaceae, with Araucariaceae (in Australia and South America) and Podocarpaceae (in scattered tropical locales) locally important. See genus and species descriptions for particulars.
Several conifers, particularly in the genera Agathis (Araucariaceae), Abies, and Pinus (Pinaceae), produce economically important resins. Resins are sticky, liquid, organic substances that usually harden when exposed to air into brittle, amorphous, solid substances. Natural resins are classified according to their physical and chemical properties into hard resins, oleoresins, and gum resins (Moussouris and Regato 1999).
Conifers have a long and complex spiritual tradition in our culture. Their evergreen nature has made them symbols of immortality; Taxus baccata is a good example. Spiritual powers were also attributed to the cedar of Lebanon, Cedrus libani. Other trees were so important to the lives of aboriginal peoples that they were personified or worshipped; examples include the western redcedar, Thuja plicata; the Bunya pine, Araucaria bidwillii; and the kauri, Agathis australis. Even in our modern secular culture, people still speak reverently about species such as the Coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) and the Sequoiadendron.

Observations

Conifers are very popular ornamentals, widely used in landscaping. Good places to observe the diversity of conifers include arboreta, botanical gardens, zoos, and often city parks. However, I feel they are best seen in the wild, growing and reproducing in their native habitat. The species pages on this site will give you information helpful in finding such sites.

Remarks

Conifers are known from fossils more than 290 million years old. Although more species of conifers once existed, they are still a widely distributed group.
Conifers reproduce by means of seeds borne on the scales of female cones, and the pollen is produced in separate male cones. Pollination in conifers is always dependent on wind currents to blow the abundant yellow pollen from the male cones to the female cones.

Citations

Flowering plants

Plants flower faster than climate change models predict

By Matt McGrath Science reporter, BBC World Service

"Warming chambers" are used to assess how plants respond to elevated temperatures

Related Stories

• Flowers bloom earlier as UK warms
• UK trees' fruit ripening earlier
• Spring comes 'earlier than ever'

Scientific models are failing to accurately predict the impact of global warming on plants, says a new report.

Researchers found in long-term studies that some are flowering up to eight times faster than models anticipate.

The authors say that poor study design and a lack of investment in experiments partly account for the difference.

They suggest that spring flowering and leafing will continue to advance at the rate of 5 to 6 days per year for every degree celsius of warming.

The results are published in the journal Nature.

For more than 20 years, scientists have been carrying out experiments to mimic the impacts of rising temperatures on the first leafing and flowering of plant species around the world.
“Start Quote

The bottom line is that the impacts might be bigger than we have believed until now”

End Quote This Rutishauser Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research

Researchers had assumed that plants would respond in essentially the same way to experimental warming with lamps and open top chambers as they would to changes in temperatures in the real world.

Very little has been done to test the assumption until this study lead by Dr Elizabeth Wolkovich, who is now at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

With her colleagues she studied the timing of the flowering and leafing of plants in observational studies and warming experiments spanning four continents and 1,634 plant species.

According to Dr Wolkovich, the results were a surprise.

"What we found is that the experiments don't line up with the long term data, and in fact they greatly underestimate how much plants change their leafing and flowering with warming," she said.

"So for models based on experimental data, then we would expect that plants are leafing four times faster and flowering eight times faster in the long term historical record than what we're using in some of the models."
'Consistent message'
Observational data have been gathered by scientific bodies for many years. In the UK, the systematic recording of flowering times dates back to 1875, when the Royal Meteorological Society established a national network of observers.

Since then, data has also been recorded by full-time biologists and part-time enthusiasts, and in recent years there have been mass-participation projects such as BBC Springwatch.

This new research suggests that these observations of flowering and leafing carried out in many different parts of the world over the past thirty years are remarkably similar according to Dr Wolkovich.

"In terms of long term observations, the records are very coherent and very consistent and they suggest for every degree celsius of warming we get we are going to get a five- to six-day change in how plants leaf and flower."

She argues that the difficulties in mimicking the impacts of nature in an artificial setting are much greater than many scientists estimate. The team found that in some cases the use of warming chambers to artificially raise temperatures can sometimes have the opposite effect.

National and international citizen scientist efforts will help provide much more data to resolve the question

"In the real world, we don't just see changes in temperature - we see changes in precipitation and cloud patterns and other factors - so certainly when you think about replicating changes in clouds, we are very, very far away from being able to do that.

"I guess we will never get to perfectly match nature, but I am hopeful as scientists we can do much, much better, given funding resources."

The team found that the greater investment in the design and monitoring of experiments, the more accurate the result.

"We have a very consistent message from the long-term historical records about how plants are changing, but we need to think more critically about how we fund and invest in and really design experiments," said Dr Wolkovich.

"We do need them in the future, they are the best way going forward to project how species are changing but right now what we're doing isn't working as well as I think it could."

Other researchers were equally surprised by the results.

Dr This Rutishauser is at the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern in Switzerland. He says that in light of this work scientists will have to rethink the impacts of global warming.

"The bottom line is that the impacts might be bigger than we have believed until now. That's going to provoke a lot of work to probably revise modelling results for estimations of what's going to happen in the future for food production especially."

Dr Wolkovich agrees that if the models are so significantly underestimating the real world observations, there could be also be impacts on water the world over.

"If a whole plant community starts growing a week earlier than we expect according to these experiments, it's going to take up a lot more water over the growing season and if you add to that many years of the model projections, you are going to see big changes in the water supply."

She appeals to people to get involved in citizen science projects and help gather data on flowering and leafing, especially in remote areas.

The National Phenology Network in the US logged its millionth observation this week, and similar programmes are underway in the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, and a pan-European database is under development.

"We have very few monitoring networks. We need many, many people out there observing this because it is changing faster and across more habitats than we are currently measuring - we need more help!"