The principles and the general arrangements set up by EEC led France to noticeably change her reglementary apparatus in the domain of modernization. In front of the reservations of, if not the opposition from the farmer organizations, the new regime was set up slowly. The retained procedure is decentralized at the departmental scale and stresses the desire to preserve the responsibility of the farmer in his development choices. One can notice the progress of the number of applications. On the contrary one cannot see much change in the profiles of the beneficiary farms, except for a tendency for applications to arise from young farmers soon after their settlement.
