Everything has increased in recent months, especially with the Covid crisis: cereals that we import to feed livestock, fertilizers to produce, electricity and gas to run machines, heat greenhouses, cardboard for package the products, the fuels to transport them, etc. These increases will therefore be passed on to the consumer. And above all, in the context of the war in Ukraine, they will continue this year. Just look at world grain prices: the price of wheat, corn and oil are breaking records. Russia and Ukraine, for example, are major grain exporters.
3% increase on average and according to estimates, this is the result of the negotiations which ended on Wednesday March 2 between the agri-food manufacturers, farmers, producers on the one hand and the distributors, the big brands like Carrefour, Auchan, Leclerc, on the other. They set the prices for the year for the products you find on the supermarket shelves. And this year, these negotiations were even more tense than usual: originally, in order not to produce at a loss, producers and farmers asked for 6%, while distributors wanted to pay as little as possible. . They agreed on 3% on average. Which is a lot compared to previous years. Usually, we were rather between 0.1 and 0.3% increase. It marks a real break.
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The President of the Republic warned during his speech on Wednesday March 2: “The price of refueling, the amount of the heating bill, the cost of certain products are likely to increase further.” With the war in Ukraine, in fact, this level of 3% is in danger of quickly being shattered and exceeded. But, Emmanuel Macron promised “a suitable response” to preserve the purchasing power of the French. The government will present an economic and social resilience plan in which there will be an extension of the tariff shield for gas until the end of the year.
Aid for farmers, but also for the most vulnerable businesses. There could also be checks for the poorest, the return of one-euro meals for non-scholarship students. After “whatever the cost” deployed during the Covid crisis, the government is already working on a “whatever the cost” to deal with the economic consequences of the war.