For Bruno Le Maire, the food sector should not be singled out in the current crisis.

“There have been no profiteers from inflation in the food sector,” says the Minister of the Economy in an interview with the newspaper

Le Parisien .

released on Saturday.

In a context where the inflation rate for food products approached 12% over one year in October, “I asked the General Inspectorate of Finance (IGF) to carry out a study”.

“The conclusion is without appeal […].

Neither the farmers nor the distributors, nor the agri-food industry have taken excessive remuneration in the process”.

No “abusive increases” according to several reports

According to the report, “in total, the rise in food prices results from the combination of several factors: war in Ukraine, post-Covid recovery, global warming, animal health crisis and various factors of an economic nature”.

At the end of June, the chairman of the strategic committee for E.Leclerc stores, Michel-Edouard Leclerc, deplored that "half of the increases requested" by manufacturers in the context of renegotiations on the price of foodstuffs intended to be sold by supermarkets were "not transparent" and were "suspicious".

A senatorial report published on July 19, however, had concluded that with the exception of a few “specific cases” there was no “generalized phenomenon of abusive increases”.

A few days later, a report by deputies Aurélie Trouvou (LFI) and Xavier Albertini (Horizons) had not made it possible to detect "systemic abusive behavior on the part of manufacturers or distributors".

For its part, the IGF selected a sample of 12 everyday food products 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 agri-food industry has compressed its margins” and on the other hand that “supermarkets have not contributed to raising consumer prices for food products”.

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.

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Soon an “agreement on the sharing of value”

Bruno Le Maire also proposes to organize at the beginning of 2023 a “convention on the sharing of value”, within the Renaissance party.

He wants to involve "economists, business leaders, employees and opposition groups".

Finally, he recalls his intention for France to put in place “a global minimum corporate tax of 15% at the start of 2023”, if no agreement is reached at European level by December.

The Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Germany will introduce similar national taxation “in the same timetable”, in line with a commitment made in September.

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