As part of the final stakeholder workshop, the French team led two focus groups on policy needs at the local, national and European levels.

At the local level, discussions pointed out the need to develop policies and support instruments and initiatives promoting the reconnection of food production and consumption. The importance of training consumers and future consumers to the challenges of agriculture and food, and to the types of animal products and other MiFAS product to eat was mentioned. Training could also support the development of farmers’ skills to go for these products with relevant farming practices (e.g. the strong taste of sheep meat can be mitigated by specific feeding practices at fattening). Funding local mediators with expertise on agriculture and food could be a strong policy to educate to the interests of MiFAS. The supply of local school canteens could also be explored to develop the consumption of MiFAS products. All these initiatives and collaborations could be supported through local food projects called “Plan alimentaire territorial”, an interesting way of promoting landscape approaches and involving multiple types of actors concerned locally.

Another perspective at the local level lies in the need to develop policies and support instruments and initiatives promoting collective organizations. MiFAS by-products could be given further value by re-establishing value chains e.g. for wool. Incentives or public payments could support ecograzing to keep landscapes open (especially regarding fire risk and tourism) and the joint production of meat. Municipalities may drive local policies to let livestock farmers access land and host them properly considering the service they provide. Inspiration from collective management in mountain area should be taken (AFP, Pastoral Land Association). Tourists could voluntarily contribute to such funding when they visit national or regional parks where livestock maintain the landscape open.

At national level, the need to translate policies and the related legislation to farmers was important for the participants. One participant reported that as a cooperative employee, she had spent much time understanding the legislation in order to explain it clearly to the farmers. This was mainly due to the fact that legislation such as nitrate directive is updated each year and may depend on the region. A simplification or at least flexibility with possible subsidies depending on steps, such as for the eco-regime, was also deemed necessary. Further insights on the trajectories of farms over time was considered necessary to assess their progress towards an adapted goal.

Participants considered that for MiFAS to develop, one of these two options are necessary, or a combination of both: 1) payments for ecosystem services offered by MiFAS; 2) price premiums from MiFAS products. Another one is also to think about how to facilitate the innovation in the CAP. And one of the first steps is to favour the eligibility of the agroforestry area for direct payment, without considering the tree density. A second step would be to facilitate the tree plantation subsidy in the second pillar, without any technical conditions about tree species or tree number, with a focus on the project conception rather than technical conditions. Agricultural should be considered as a new production system, as any other production systems of the farm. Therefore, farmers can plant and manage the trees with more freedom, without any conditionality constraints. The experience shows that in this context, farmers are stimulated to set up more project that in a heavy controlled environment. This kind of measure should be also to be applied to a long-term period (over 5 years).

Developing local value chains with infrastructures to process local products for human and livestock feeding is important for the network. Farmers prefer to be paid for their work rather than depending for subsidy or constraints. They will plant for their farm, with agroecology reasons. If the partners can pay the biomass with a profitable price (timber, wood chips…), farmers won’t need more subsidies for maintaining the farm income. And the same thinking applies to agricultural products if a different quality is existing (quality of meat, milk, wheat…).