If distributors and manufacturers were received this week by Bercy, other players are worried about their fate. The Minister of the Economy, Bruno Le Maire, hammered home his objective on Thursday of “definitively breaking the price spiral” with new trade negotiations “from September”. However, “French agriculture cannot be the adjustment variable for these negotiations which are opening,” said Friday on BFMTV Arnaud Rousseau, president of the FNSEA and the Avril group.
“For almost ten years, deflation in agriculture has led the sector to become impoverished. We have succeeded with the Egalim laws in sanctuarizing the agricultural raw material. There are probably big players who had big margins. In this collective effort, we need to make sure that this is not done on the backs of the farmers”, underlines the manager. Especially since with this inflation and the rise in raw materials, “we see a certain number of our compatriots no longer being able to feed themselves”, warns Arnaud Rousseau. The president of the FNSEA in particular asked Bruno Le Maire to receive the representatives of the farmers in order to “ensure that in this negotiation which opens, agriculture is not the variable of adjustment”, a-t- he repeats.
An observation shared by Dominique Chargé, president of the Agricultural Cooperation, also invited on Friday on BFMTV: “The drop in prices must not be to the detriment of French farmers. This situation leads us to note a descent in range [of production].” Added to this are production costs that are still rising due to inflation. “We have regained a certain stability but costs will remain structurally high”, explains Dominique Chargé, before adding that “energy costs us twice as much as two years ago and wages have increased by 10%, to rightly”.
The president of the Agricultural Cooperation, also a producer, also questions the functioning of the market: “My organic chicken coops are empty because we no longer have a market and we import Ukrainian chickens massively. We need a shock of competitiveness and normative simplification to supply agricultural products that the market demands today and that we can no longer do.” These are all topics that will be discussed over the coming weeks with the Minister of the Economy.
