Quelles limites à la solidarité ? La solidarité voulue et déjà réalisée par les profession­nels et les pouvoirs publics peut-elle être renforcée sans nuire à l'intensification des exploitations agricoles dans leur ensemble ?

Can the existing solidarity realized by farm organizations and public authorities be strengthened without jeopardizing the entire intensification process of the farm ? The economic machinery of agriculture threatens to collapse for different reasons among which the compulsory levies are often mentioned as the most important. The farmers are actually the only social category to provide such an effort of internal solidarity. For this reason, we want to stress that this specific solidarity can not be extended indefinitely in its present form in the existing gloomy economic farming context. In the prospect of renewed solidarity it is important to fix its limits (in our opinion, the criterion should be the gross added value per ha in order to favor an active employment policy) but also to avoid the dogmatisms of political ideologies. We therefore propose a new legal framework for the farm, a «personal liability firm» where a good part of the solidarity charges could be included in the tax system. Now that the farming universe is opening up towards the rest of the economy, it would be a good thing to reconcile its legal and fiscal framework with that of the other social categories. The limits to this solidarity are undoubtedly both sociological and economic : the approach consisting in increasing intra­agricultural levies in order to solve present difficulties means to maintain a kind of social discrimination towards agriculture by keeping it secluded form the rest of the economy.