2023-08-26 16:55:49
Why does the government want to bring professionals together?
The Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire announced on Thursday August 24 that he would meet “next week distributors and manufacturers to take a new look at the fight against the high cost of living”. The precise date of the meeting, organized with the Minister of Commerce Olivia Grégoire, is not yet known.
For several months, Bercy has estimated that the reduction in the prices of certain raw materials (such as wheat), energy as well as maritime freight, has given the agri-food sector some leeway to adjust its prices. The government is pressuring manufacturers to do their part in efforts to control prices. ” I tell the French that from the month of July, on a certain number of references and products, the prices will drop, had thus promised Bruno Le Maire, on June 9.And we’ll check it, and we’ll punish those who don’t play the game. »
In July, Ania (National Association of Food Industries) announced that a ” quarantine “ major agri-food industries had undertaken to make a « effort » on the price of“about 1,000 products” big brands.
Why have food prices increased so much?
According to a senatorial report published in July 2022, inflation in France, lower than in other countries, “is the direct translation of the spectacular surge in the price of agricultural and industrial raw materials, explained both by the economic recovery in 2021 (rising demand, still disorganized supply), extreme climatic hazards (heat dome in Canada, droughts, late frost, etc.) and, more recently, the war in Ukraine. » According to this report, “the latter would explain approximately 30% of the observed inflation”. But at the time, the senators did not see “no massive phenomenon of suspicious increases” on a national level.
In June 2023, theInsee pointed out that «the increase in the cost of inputs outside the sector – world prices of agricultural raw materials, energy, etc. – would have explained (…) about half of the dynamics of consumer prices in food. “Wage costs would have been the second factor in the rise in these prices in 2022, contributing in particular to just over a third of the rise in consumer prices of food products excluding fresh food”. Finally, INSEE evoked, with methodological precautions, a “significant increase” margins of the agri-food industries and vice versa “a squeeze” unit margins of distributors from the end of 2021 until the end of 2022.
Will food prices decrease in the short term?
The next figures from the National Institute of Statistics will be known on August 31. But in July, theInsee calculated that food prices had risen sharply again, by 12.7% year on year in July.
But, an encouraging sign, this increase has been less sustained since March 2023, the month when food inflation reached +15.9%. Thus, excluding fresh products, growth in food prices slowed for the third consecutive month (+13.0%, after +14.1% in June).
However, who says a slowdown in the rise does not mean a decrease in prices. “What I am announcing to you is that there will be no green September. There won’t be a massive price drop,” declared at the end of July Michel-Edouard Leclerc on Europe 1. “We must stop selling dreams to the French, we will not find the prices before the crisis”, confirmed on RTLMichel Biero, executive purchasing and marketing director of Lidl France.
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