“ The Senate ready to unravel the EGalim law: an unacceptable provocation for the FNSEA », the press release, published Tuesday, February 7 by the main agricultural union, sounded the alarm. However, the next day, the mobilization organized in Paris by the FNSEA, with its impressive armada of tractors, did not mention the subject. Even if senators and deputies had come to swell the ranks of cereal farmers demonstrating on the Esplanade des Invalides, eager to support them. The topic of the day was defending the use of phytosanitary products in general, and neonicotinoids in particular.
At the same time, the Senate’s Economic Affairs Committee was considering a bill on “the supply of French people with consumer products”. A text carried by the deputy (Renaissance) of Val-de-Marne, Frédéric Descrozaille and adopted by the National Assembly on January 18 in a more than stormy climate. Difficult to articulate a text of law which manages to reconcile interests as distant as those of the distributors and their suppliers. Especially since it also determines the remuneration of farmers.
A “coup de grace to our sector”
The Senate commission negotiated a 180-degree turn on this bill, which was the subject of intense lobbying by stakeholders. In its initial version, it extended until 2026 the provisions of the EGalim 1 law concerning promotions and the threshold for resale at a loss. Adopted in October 2018, this system, which expired in April 2023, regulates reductions on food products in supermarkets, and increases by 10% the threshold for resale at a loss (SRP + 10), below which a distributor cannot resell a product. However, an amendment comes on the contrary to suspend this device for increasing the threshold of resale at a loss for two years.
“We denounce this initiative which risks having dramatic effects for the entire sector: some distributors are just waiting for this signal to relaunch a price war affecting all food products”, reacts the FNSEA, which stresses that this measure is not responsible for the food inflation currently suffered by the consumer. An unraveling of the EGalim 1 law which worries the agricultural union, assuring that it would be a “coup de grace to our sector and to the work of all the farmers”. But which the distributors welcome, such as Michel-Edouard Leclerc, president of the strategic committee of the E.Leclerc centers, for whom this provision “taken in the name of runoff, which already made no sense in times of deflation and which has not been corroborated by any analysis”is even less justified in times of inflation with the “maintenance of a minimum margin of 10%”.
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