Bruno Le Maire has the proof in figures: “There were no inflation profiteers in food.” “Neither the farmers nor the distributors, nor the agri-food industry have taken excessive remuneration in the process”, assures the Minister of the Economy in an interview with Parisian posted Saturday, November 5.
Whereas the food inflation rate approached 12% over one year in October according to INSEE, the minister had requested a report from the General Inspectorate of Finance (IGF). And “the conclusion is without appeal”, according to Bruno Le Maire. On the one hand, the study reveals “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”.
According to this report, which AFP was able to consult, “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 work…)”.
To arrive at these conclusions, the General Inspectorate of Finance studied the evolution of the gross margin of the various actors in the production chain on a selection of twelve everyday food products (chicken cutlet, plain yogurt, baguette bread. ..).
Despite this sharing of the effort, and lower inflation in France than in other European countries, the General Inspectorate of Finance 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, Michel-Edouard Leclerc, the boss of the Leclerc group, had deplored that “half of the requested increases” by industrialists were not “not transparent” and were “suspicious”. In July, a Senate report concluded that with the exception of a few “special cases” it had not been observed “widespread phenomenon of excessive increases”.