Vive Lamour

For centuries, the sunbaked southern French provinces known as the Midi eked out their living supplying the rest of France with table wines; when the grapes were poor, so were the farmers. But no more. Today, along with wine, growing shipments of melons, asparagus, peaches and strawberries flow from the Midi into Paris. Responsible for this profitable bounty is a new network of dams, canals and irrigation ditches running from Marseille westward almost to the Spanish border. Responsible for the irrigation network is a 59-year-old northern Frenchman with the incontestably Gallic name of Philippe Lamour.

Born on a farm near the Belgian border, rugged Philippe Lamour migrated to Paris as a young man, became a successful lawyer and politician. In 1940, along with other Parisians, he fled south ahead of the Nazi panzers. Lamour never went back. He stopped running in the Midi town of Bellegarde, bought a rundown, 115-acre tract known as "The Farm of the Partridge," and settled down. At war's end, he added 50 more acres, traded in his horses for tractors and successfully grew strawberries and cauliflower in an area previously wedded to wine.

Tu & Toi. Lamour had fallen in love with the Midi, but he recognized his love's faults. The sun shines brightly year-round in the Midi, but the 30 inches of rain that the area gets in an average year is concentrated in about 80 days. The obvious solution: irrigation. Visiting the U.S., Lamour studied TVA dams and California's irrigated valleys, then returned to the Midi to duplicate what he had seen.

Lamour's first task was to win the support of his fellow farmers in the lower Rhone Valley. He sparked the formation of a partly private, partly government development corporation and sent its agents into Midi homes to argue for an irrigation system that would wipe out the area's dependence on grapes alone. Lamour's advice to his agents: "Never refuse a glass of wine. Try to get on 'tu' and 'toi' terms with everyone."

Produce to Paris. To farmers, Lamour's irrigation scheme was attractive. Less attractive was his proposal that they plow under 300,000 acres of vines and turn to cultivating unfamiliar crops. But Lamour had two persuasive arguments. His diversified Farm of the Partridge was conspicuously profitable. And at Lamour's urging, the government (which is trying to reduce wine production) offered to pay $363 an acre to every Midi farmer who plowed under his grapevines.

Since 1957, Lamour's tu-and-toi technique has produced impressive results. A dam on the Orb River is complete, another is under way on a tributary of the Herault River, and 42 miles of canal are finished. Ultimately, at a cost of $300 million, the Midi will be irrigated. Last year 40,000 tons of Midi apples and peaches reached Paris, and by 1965, annual shipments are expected to top 100,000 tons. Another dividend of Lamour's investment: the U.S.'s Libby, McNeill & Libby is surveying sites for a food processing plant in the south.

Lamour himself now spends much of his time lecturing away from home or escorting distinguished visitors over dams and through fields and orchards. Nikita Khrushchev, after such a visit, paid the Midi man a cherished compliment. "The man who astonished me the most in all France," said he, "was Philippe Lamour. He's the only Frenchman who could stand up to me."

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