The Senate economic affairs committee, which examined a bill intended to rebalance trade relations, wished to review one of the provisions of the Egalim law on the resale threshold at a loss.
by Laurence Girard and Cécile Prudhomme
“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, was sounding 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 grown up the ranks of cereal trees demonstrating on the Esplanade des Invalides, eager to support them. The subject of the day was the defense of the use of phytosanitary products in general, and neonicotinoids in particular.
At the same time, the Senate economic affairs committee was leaned over 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 climate more than stormy. Difficult to articulate a law which manages to reconcile interest as distant as those of distributors and their suppliers. Especially since it also conditions the remuneration of farmers.
a “blow of thanks to our sector”
The Senate Commission negotiated a 180 degree turn on this bill which was the subject of intense lobbying of the actors. In its initial version, it extended until 2026 the provisions of the Egalim 1 law concerning promotions and the resale threshold at a loss. Adopted in October 2018, this system, which died in April 2023, frames discounts on food products in supermarkets, and increased by 10 % the resale threshold at a loss (SRP + 10), below which a distributor cannot resell a product. However, an amendment comes, conversely, suspend this increase in the increase in the resale threshold at a loss for two years.
“We denounce this initiative which risks having dramatic effects for the entire sector: some distributors are waiting for this signal to relaunch a price war touching all food products”, reacts the FNSEA , which stresses that this measure is not responsible for food inflation currently suffered by the consumer. A unraveling of the Egalim 1 law which worries the agricultural union, ensuring that it would be a “grace of our sector and the work of all farmers”. But of which distributors congratulate, like Michel-Edouard Leclerc, President of the Strategic Committee of E.Leclerc Centers, for whom this provision “taken in the name of runoff, which already had no meaning in period of deflation and which does not Was corroborated by no analysis “, is even less justified during the inflation period with the” maintenance of a minimum margin of 10 % “.
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