Bruno Le Maire has the proof in figures: “There were no profiteers from inflation in the food industry”. “Neither the farmers nor the distributors, nor the agri-food industry took excessive remuneration in the process”, assures the Minister of the Economy in an interview granted to the Parisianon the evening of Saturday 5 November.
While the inflation rate for food products approached 12% over one year in October according to INSEE, The Minister had asked the General Inspectorate of Finance (IGF) to carry out a study. And “the conclusion is without appeal”, so, according to him. According to the report seen by AFP, “All in all, the rise in food prices is the result of a combination of several factors: war in Ukraine, post-Covid recovery, global warming, animal health crisis and various factors of an economic nature (competitiveness of the economy, shortage of labor -of work…)”.
How did the IGF proceed? She selected a sample of twelve everyday food products (chicken cutlet, plain yoghurt, baguette, etc.) and studied the evolution over time of the gross margin of the various actors in the production chain. The analysis reveals on the one hand “that the food industry has squeezed its margins” and on the other hand that “supermarkets have not contributed to raising consumer prices for food products”thus disproving the hypothesis of inflation suffered only by the final consumer.
Despite this sharing of the effort, and lower inflation in France than in other European countries, the IGF points out that in one year, “Certain food products have experienced particularly high price increases with, for example, +60% for oils, +22% for flour, +20% for pasta and +16% for poultry.”
At the end of June, the president of the strategic committee of E.Leclerc stores, Michel-Edouard Leclerc, had deplored that “half of the requested increases” by manufacturers in the context of renegotiations on the price of foodstuffs intended to be sold by supermarkets were not “not transparent” and were “suspicious”. A Senate report released on July 19, however, concluded that with the exception of a few “special cases” it was not observed “widespread phenomenon of excessive increases”.
A few days later, a report by the deputies Aurélie Trouvou (La France insoumise) and Xavier Albertini (Horizons) had not made it possible to detect either “systemic abusive behavior on the part of manufacturers or distributors”.