L’Inra face au tournant libéral de la Politique agricole commune : les chemins d’une acculturation (1978-1992)

Between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1990s, economists at France’s National Institute for Agricultural Research (Institut national de la recherche agronomique, INRA) faced the challenge of finding a scientifically valid and politically relevant answer to the liberalization process that was affecting agricultural markets worldwide. Engaged in both a theoretical and a methodological aggiornamento, these economists were able to gain, if not the confidence of INRA’s leadership, then at least its approval, enabling the institute to anticipate a liberal reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. The aim of this paper, which approaches the subject from both a historical and an economic perspective, is thus to shed light on the conditions of this paradoxical rallying, in a professional world characterized by its attachment to a conception of “progress” that is inseparable from state interventionism. Based on a study of the trajectories, positions, and discourses of the main protagonists who shaped the scientific strategy and the public expertise in the field of agricultural policies during these crucial years, this paper defends the hypothesis that this rallying around a heteronomous standard was mainly an act of anticipation, linked to the emergence of a knowledge-based economy at the end of the twentieth century.