French pigs | Getty Europe’s sick farmer France’s agricultural model is in trouble.

The sight of French farmers blocking roads, torching tires and dumping their produce in the streets is a staple of French life — on par with the Tour de France and jet flyovers during the Bastille Day military parade.

But the displays of outrage this summer point to more than just bad humor among farmers. Insiders warn that a support system made up of price controls, European Union subsidies and state aid, which has kept swathes of French agriculture in business for decades, is unraveling.

Unless France reforms agriculture in depth, farmers, meat purchasers and analysts say that some sectors — notably breeders — are set to go the way of coal mining, and disappear.

“The entire breeding sector, from pork to beef to milk producers, faces a huge competitiveness challenge,” Pascal Viné, the general delegate of the Coop de France group of agricultural firms, told POLITICO. “We’ve reached a point where we can no longer play for time and hope that prices will pick up.”

The latest crisis is partly explained by European Union economic sanctions on Russia, a huge export market for EU meat that has largely been shut off to farmers. Unable to sell to the east, farmers have flooded the European market with cheap meat products to drain supply.

While French industrial purchasers normally agree to absorb a set volume of local production at controlled prices agreed during roundtables, this time some of them balked over the huge difference between the cost of French meat and products from Germany or Spain — around 30 euro cents per kilo.

Many French farmers blame other European countries for causing their woes by overproducing meat and selling it too cheaply.

Some complained that buying French meat at inflated prices would put them at a serious economic disadvantage. The refusal of just two moderately sized groups, Bigard and Cooperl, to buy a certain volume of pork at an agreed price of €1.40 per kilo was enough to upset the tightly-controlled system, shutting down the Brittany pork product exchange for eight days.

Pig farmers reacted with wildcat protests, demanding immediate government intervention. On Tuesday, Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll, a close ally of President François Hollande, brokered a deal to reopen the exchange and kick-start sales near the agreed price, after other purchasers agreed to pick up what Bigard and Cooperl still refused to buy.

But prices quickly slipped below €1.40, and some 30,000 pigs — about half the overhang — remained unsold as of Tuesday evening. Hinting at his own government’s inability to address the price issue, Le Foll — who is appreciated by farmers for his gruff manner and track record handling previous crises — said last week that the only solution was to harmonize prices between EU states.

“If we could find a price compatible with the Spanish, German or British systems, we could talk,” Agence-France Presse quoted him as saying at a news conference. “Today, we are far from being able to harmonize our prices. Europe is not getting organized quickly enough.”

Like Le Foll, many French farmers blame other European countries for causing their woes by overproducing meat and selling it too cheaply. Catherine Laillé, president of the national pig breeders organisation, agrees with that diagnosis, but she also blames the government for failing to address the mature sow in the room: excessive production prices in France.

“If you drive around the French south you don't see any cows anymore, or any pigs, or any animals raised for meat” — Catherine Laillé, pig breeder.

Indeed, over the past decade, French breeders have fallen far behind their EU neighbors in price competitiveness.

While France boasts vast arable lands and French farmers are the top beneficiary of European farming subsidies via the Common Agricultural Pact — which Paris has defended for decades — its farmers face much higher production costs than German or Spanish farmers, notably due to higher social welfare charges and taxes. They also have to follow sanitary, environmental and labeling standards that are often more stringent than what is required by EU law.

The result is that the total volume of pork produced in France has dropped steadily over the past few years — to 13.3 million heads in 2014 from 15 million in 2006, according to FranceAgriMer, a government-funded body that studies agriculture.

“I think he [Le Foll] hasn't understood that unless we change the structure of costs in the breeding sector, it's going to die out,” Laillé, who keeps 110 pigs in the western Loire Atlantique region, told POLITICO. “The government needs to act on the social charges, which must be harmonized across the European Union.”

Laillé and other French farmers want the government to press other European capitals to impose controls on pricing and production to even out the differences. Le Foll will try to obtain guarantees on September 7, when he meets counterparts from several EU farming nations in Brussels at talks called by France.

But the chances of France winning a major regulatory victory to control pricing and production across the bloc appear limited, because France is effectively the odd one out among producers of cheap meat. Other states have lowered their meat production costs drastically through a variety of means — from modernized breeding and slaughtering to cheap labor by migrant workers.

“There is an enormous amount of work to be done in the sector,” said Viné. “France needs to take a hard look at how we handle social welfare charges, taxes and regulations.”

Laillé said that she had borrowed €20,000 from a bank to cover operating costs at her farm while she waited for the price conflict to be resolved. The size of her operation and years of experience would allow her to pay back the money and stay in business. But, she said that other, less resilient farms were bound to go under.

“If you drive around the French south you don't see any cows anymore, or any pigs, or any animals raised for meat,” she said. “All of that is going down the drain.”