Rene Dumont; Model for France’s Greens

Rene Dumont, the first candidate to run for president of France on an environmental platform and whose influence helped shape the Green Party in his country, has died. He was 97.

Dumont, an agricultural economist who was an expert on the problems faced by developing nations, died Monday in suburban Paris.

Running for president of France in 1974 on an environmental platform, Dumont got about 1.3% of the vote in an election won by Valery Giscard d’Estaing.

Nine years later, the Green Party was founded in France.

“We trace the debut of Green politics to Rene Dumont’s presidential campaign in 1974,” Dominique Voynet, France’s environment minister, told reporters in Paris. “For many, he was our model.”

Dumont was a champion of healthy farming, redistribution of wealth and international cooperation to help poor nations.

For more than a quarter-century, he preached that simple solutions must be found to deal with the traditional shortcomings of African farmers. Education and small loans were more important than elaborate machinery and big projects, Dumont observed.

Born in Cambrai, Dumont learned about agriculture in post-World War I France from his father.

“I studied agriculture because you have to understand the world to change it,” Dumont once told a reporter. “Rather than focusing on a neighborhood in France, I look at the whole world. But it is the same thing.”

As a colonial officer in Indochina in the 1930s, he wrote a book about rice that also told how officials destroyed 500,000 tons of rice to bolster the price of French wheat.

Dumont spent much of his career as a professor of agricultural sciences at one of France’s leading agriculture schools. He was associated with the United Nations through UNESCO and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and wrote nearly 30 books.

His most influential book was “False Start in Africa,” published in 1962, which critiqued African developmental policies in the colonial and early post-colonial era.

In noting his passing, France’s Green Party called Dumont “the man who made it possible to bring environmental policies in a direct and natural manner into the political world.”

Dumont is survived by his companion, Charlotte Paquiet.