Territorial anchorage in the French dairy ewe sector: Historical analysis of the construction of interdependent localized agrifood systems

In the eighties, the dairy ewe producers of Pyrenées Atlantiques (PA) and Corsica (CS) faced a crisis: most of the Roquefort (RF) industrial cheesemakers that had collected their milk for nearly a century withdrew from both areas. A new dynamic had to be created: the rebirth of on-farm processing (involving local technical and cultural memory) and the emergence of new processing firms. Local stake-holders created PDO (Protected Designation of Ori-gin) products: “Ossau Iraty” in PA and “Brocciu” in CS. These PDOs are still having some difficulty in building consensus within their local stakeholder systems. The shared history of producing milk for RF cheesemakers (the Roquefort Era) and the period that followed their withdrawal conditioned the situation for both the PA and the CS systems: the last 40 years have been a period of re-appropriation of the production system by local stakeholders (with varying degrees of success and completeness). To analyze this period and the current situation of the PA and CS systems, we have adopted the concept of “territorial anchorage”. This concept implies two things: (i) A geographical area and a system of stake-holders can interact in a dynamic way. A long-term analysis provides an overview of how a local system has changed over time. Such an analysis may make the current situation more understandable and shed some light on how it could evolve; (ii) For activities to be linked to an area, there must be a set of links of different intensities and past durations (social cohesion, economic value-added, a recognized terroir). As these links have been recently reactivated or re-created, some elements (e.g. certified cheeses) are becoming territorial resources. These mechanisms are also subject to external forces (co-existence of different processing methods, use of the territory’s image). With the territorial anchorage concept we can com-pare two territories, the study of each being enriched by examining the other’s trajectory and pattern of links with its area. It may help us to understand the constraints faced in building coherence and autonomy in a cheese production system at different institutional levels (local economy, social and economic organization, policy).