René Dumont, third world agronomist and visionary
Audio 04:01
René Dumont, in April 1974, during his electoral campaign for the presidential election of May 1974. © AFP
By: Agnès Rougier
11 mins
An expert in agricultural development who became an environmental activist, René Dumont claimed to be above all a Third Worldist.
All his life, this agricultural engineer has fought to "
end hunger
".
Combining commitment, scientific knowledge, critical analysis and a good sense of communication, René Dumont, the first ecological candidate for the 1974 presidential elections, is considered to be the creator of political ecology in France.
Publicity
René Dumont was born in the North in 1904, to an agronomist father and a mathematician mother and college director, both secular republicans.
René Dumont is 10 years old at the start of the First World War, he lives with his family near the front lines and his confrontation with the horrors of war will make him pacifist forever.
As a little boy, René Dumont adores spending his holidays on his grandparents' farm and encouraged by his father who communicates to him his attachment to the land, to plants, to animals, he decides, at a very young age, to study agronomy and he brilliantly passed the entrance examination to the National Institute of Agronomy in 1922.
After graduating, René Dumont left to do his military service, but the young man with a rebellious and pacifist temperament saw him very badly and came out of it depressed.
To recover, he will work as a farm worker for a year on his uncles' farm.
Young Productivist Agronomist
In 1927, René Dumont, a young agricultural engineer, wanted to discover the world, make himself useful, and he entered the National Institute of Colonial Agronomy (INAC).
He works for the development of intensive agriculture through chemical fertilizers and machinery.
The INAC sent him on a mission to Morocco, then to Tunisia, and finally to Indochina in 1930. He was then responsible for the agricultural station on the Red River delta, where he was responsible for testing fertilizers for rice growing.
But in parallel with his work, the agronomist meets local farmers, which will lead him to question the ideology of colonial agronomists and in his first book,
La culture du riz dans le delta du Tonkin.
René Dumont asserts his critical and anti-colonialist positions.
For Marc Dufumier, agronomist and who was his student in comparative agronomy: "
He had left to help the Vietnamese to feed themselves by intensifying their cropping system, but he discovered that the attitude of the French was very authoritarian
" .
René Dumont resigned from INAC in 1932 to join, in 1933, the National Institute of Agronomy (INA), where he created the chair of comparative agriculture in 1953.
Feed the world
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the world's population was growing.
René Dumont was then regularly asked for his advice in agronomy, first in France, to set up the system of productivist agriculture;
then at the end of the 1950s, after independence, by the young governments of the former African colonies.
But the agronomist, always attentive to the peasants, notes that the neocolonial system which consists in reproducing the agricultural techniques of the industrialized countries in the countries of the Third World is a source of social and environmental damage: "
Grandson of peasant and agronomist, I must defend the underdeveloped and often oppressed peasantry, these true proletarians of modern times
”, he wrote in a book which caused a scandal when it was published in 1962,
Black Africa is badly
started
.
An indefatigable traveler, his missions take him to more than 90 countries, from India to Cuba, where he sees the misdeeds of the Green Revolution, which encourages monoculture mechanized with chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
While not defending liberalism, René Dumont is also very critical of agriculture in “socialist countries”, and of sugar cane in Cuba in particular.
Fidel Castro, dissatisfied, will go so far as to accuse him of being a CIA agent!
Where the agronomist becomes an ecologist
While at the beginning of the 1970s, environmentalists were rather perceived as marginalized, René Dumont, a field scientist, had both the legitimacy and the knowledge which brought credibility to ecological discourse, and the taste for public speaking. “
He was a very good teacher, a very good teacher… and very controversial!
declares his former student in comparative agronomy, Marc Dufumier,
(…) but the strength of his teaching was to tell us: "before giving advice, first go and see in the field!"
"
In 1972, scientists from the Club of Rome published a report titled: "Stop Growth" - or "Meadows Report" - in which they claim that the planetary system will collapse under the pressure of population and industrial growth if nothing is not done.
And in 1973, René Dumont in turn drew up an implacable assessment of the 20th century productivist: "
We are rushing at full speed in the fog towards a cement wall
", he writes in
Utopia or death
, his latest book.
As sub-Saharan Africa has been plagued by severe droughts since 1970, the author is sounding the alarm bells about the depletion of natural resources, pollution, climate change and the risk of civilization collapse due to the growth of consumption in industrialized countries, inversely proportional to the misery of the populations of poor countries.
Birth of political ecology
Professor Dumont was 70 years old when representatives of environmental movements, including Brice Lalonde, Friends of the Earth, asked him to speak for ecology in the 1974 presidential elections;
he accepts on condition that he is left free to speak and becomes the first ecological candidate in France.
Dressed in his eternal red pullover, the candidate Dumont has a sense of the spectacle and television is the perfect opportunity to convey his ideas: "
We will soon run out of water,
" he declares to viewers and waving a full glass: "
This is why I drink in front of you a glass of precious water, since before the end of the century, if we continue such an overflow, it will fail
."
The environmental candidate, whom no installed political party supports, will collect only 1.32% of the vote in the elections, but political ecology was born.
A visionary whistleblower
The so-called “
hunger agronomist
”, visionary whistleblower, teacher and activist, anticipated in 1974 the topics that are topical today - climate change and its consequences, or the loss of life. biodiversity - he also proposed solutions, such as agroecology, the relevance of which is only beginning to be perceived.
For Marc Dufumier, “
René Dumont's main heritage is that concrete solutions, yes, there are, and there would be reasons to be optimistic about the fact that we can feed all of humanity. with forms of agriculture that respect the environment
”but when asked if he is really optimistic:“
Politically speaking?
So there, I answer René Dumont: I do not wait to find out to stay mobilized!
"
Until his death in 2001, René Dumont, author of more than 60 books, Third World activist, committed to pacifism and the emancipation of women, founding member of the Attac association in 1998, denounced the deleterious effects of productivism and inequalities between countries of the South and countries of the North.
To find out more
:
Site of the Living Museum and the René Dumont Foundation
Extract from
Black Africa is off to a bad start
René Dumont, a life captured
by
ecology
, by Jean Paul Besset, Stock edition, 1992
Marc Dufumier, agroeconomist, specialist in agriculture in developing countries
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