Will farmers bear the brunt of trade negotiations? Dairy farmers have raised the alarm at the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Agriculture. According to them, the Egalim law, intended to protect the income of the agricultural world, is no longer respected. During a meeting of the Monitoring Committee in December, both FNSEA and the Young Farmers confirmed "real reconsiderations" of this Egalim law.

Farmers fear that industrialists and distributors will agree at their expense to limit the inflation paid by consumers. The "green vests" movement, gaining momentum in Europe, demonstrates the total despair of a profession that now has less than 400,000 farmers in France.

The EGalim law aims to allow farmers to earn a decent income by better distributing value between production, processing, and distribution... With the various aspects of this law: the price is proposed by the farmers, taking into account the production costs... but in the negotiations between large retailers and industrialists, FNSEA estimates that the proposed price, especially for milk, could reduce the profit margin for producers. The Ministry of Finance must intervene to check all this! The situation is urgent... There is a fire smoldering in our countryside.

The rise in inflation has slowed down. But food prices, which have increased by more than 20%, will never return to their previous level, as all the heads of major retail chains unanimously declare!! Yet, the costs of some agricultural raw materials have decreased after the peak caused by the war in Ukraine: oil and grains, in particular. The price of sugar has dropped by more than 20% in production, but the reduction in the price of a kilogram of sugar on the shelves is minimal... the end consumer in the supply chain doesn't care about disputes between industrialists and distributors... it's them, it's us, who pay the full price!

What will be the fate of the consumer, and our farmers who are already suffering greatly and whose protests are multiplying in France but also in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Romania? The end of negotiations has been postponed until January 31.