Course Title
Sustainability in the French Agriculture Sector
Professor
Bill Martin D'87
Clinical Professor of Business Administration
Date
December 2025
Destination City
Paris and Tours
Course Description
As a future business leader, you will invariably be faced with managing sustainability issues. Your management decisions will involve weighing serious trade-offs and will have a meaningful impact on the organizations you run and their adjacent communities. The French have a tremendous amount at stake when it comes to sustainability, particularly as it relates to food and wine. France is the leading agricultural nation in the EU, and a dominant player in a broad array of food markets and subcategories. France also boasts some of the most time-honored traditions attached to the production and consumption of its products in the world. And yet, French stakeholders in each link of the agricultural supply chain have been at the vanguard of sustainability discussions and innovative solutions for years. In 2018, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Foundation, France was the top-ranked nation on the Food Sustainability Index. During this GIX, you will meet business executives, producers, policy influencers, investors, and ordinary citizens to learn more about the forces driving sustainability issues in the French agricultural sector. We will observe, firsthand, how the tension between honoring traditions and adopting more sustainable business models is being resolved in France today. This global experience will also provide students with an opportunity to hone their intuition, seek different perspectives from a wide variety of stakeholder groups, and navigate contentious ground more effectively in the future. Let us learn from experiences in France to become better, more informed decision makers in the future.