ADEME, the French Environment and Energy Management Agency, sees Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as an essential tool to guide the evolution of agricultural production chains towards environmental sustainability. ADEME implements a recent French law aiming to introduce environmental labelling of consumer products, including food, by end of 2012. Labelling should indicate the product's carbon-footprint, but also other impacts. In this context it was decided to create a public life cycle inventory (LCI) database of French agricultural raw products. The database, named agriBALYSE, will be developed by a consortium consisting of ten institutes for applied agricultural research and three agricultural research institutes specialised in the environmental analysis of farming systems. The database will apply a consistent methodology for the establishment of LCIs of plant and animal products at the farm gate. The methods used and the data format will be in accordance with ISO norms, the ILCD handbook and the general methodology adopted for the environmental labelling of consumer products in France. The methods will be developed in the project, and will be based, as much as possible, on the involvement and the consensus of the concerned stakeholders. The LCI data should allow the calculation of the indicators identified for environmental labelling, but also of other frequently used LCA indicators. By the end of June 2011 the 3-year project should deliver LCIs for the most representative production systems of the main French crop and animal products, using existing methods and data. By the end of 2012, more LCIs, based on methods developed in the project, will be available for a wider range of production systems and production modes per product, and the range of products covered will be larger. (Réumé d'auteur)