The major French charitable association Les Restos du cœur, upon which more than a million people across the country depend for basic supplies of food, has announced that, after almost 40 years of existence, it may soon have to close down due to a financial shortfall of tens of millions of euros, largely due to inflation.
According to government figures, about eight million people in France are unable to ensure their basic food requirements.
Created in 1985 by the late French comic and actor Coluche, Les Restos du cœur (literally, restaurants of the heart, or love) runs a nationwide network of food banks and mobile street kitchens, managed by tens of thousands of volunteers.
The association says that so far this year, the number of beneficiaries of its food aid, which is distributed free of charge, total 1.3 million people, compared with 1.1 million people for the whole of 2022, a rise in demand mostly made up of students and pensioners.
Along with the long-term issue of its own survival, it says it already faces turning many needy people away this winter because of the financial shortfall.
“It’s no longer tenable,” explained the association’s president Patrice Douret, himself a volunteer, speaking on Sunday to the lunchtime news programme on TV channel TF1. “At the current rhythm, if nothing is done, even the Restos du cœur could shut up shop between now and three years’ time. We have already alerted the government about the situation since several months now. We are not sufficiently listened to – I’d even say perhaps not taken sufficiently seriously.”
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The announcement made for shock headlines in France, where the charity is regarded as an institution and perennial lifebuoy for the most destitute. The government immediately announced it would provide 15 million euros in aid, while some large supermarket chains also said they would help. The offers of donations snowballed, including from the French national football team, a bank foundation, the Rungis food market that serves Paris, and oil and gas giant TotalEnergies. “It’s obvious that the more help we are given, the more we’ll untighten the noose”, commented Douret on Tuesday.
The most controversial of the sudden donations has come from the family of Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of luxury goods group LVMH, who is France’s richest individual with a personal wealth estimated by Forbes magazine at more than 190 billion euros.
At a press conference at the Paris headquarters of Les Restos du cœur on Tuesday, before a press pack and TV cameras and in front of a giant picture of Coluche, Bernard Arnault’s two sons, Pierre and Frédéric, delivered a cheque for 10 million euros. Speaking later the same day on French TV channel LCI, Alexis Corbière, a member of parliament for the radical-left LFI party, dismissed the move as a PR stunt. “Mr Bernard Arnault will earn, in an hour and a half, what he's given to the Restos du cœur,” he said. “I am not in favour of the most powerful carrying out a communications operation on the back of poverty.” In 2019, Arnault pledged to donate 200 million euros for the rebuilding of Notre-Dame cathedral after it was gutted that year by fire.
For 2023, the Restos du cœur forecasts a financial shortfall of about 20 million euros, while it predicts a further 35-million-euro shortfall for 2024. During the press conference at its headquarters on Tuesday, when the Arnault brothers delivered their family’s cheque, and in the presence of social solidarity minister Aurore Bergé, Douret insisted the association’s difficulties were set to last. “We’ll put in place braking measures […] and given the evolution of [food] prices, we’ll not go back,” he said. “My role is to preserve the association in order to continue to say ‘yes’ to the largest possible number of people.”
Yves Merillon, spokesman for the association, told Mediapart that around 150,000 people would have to be refused its help this winter.
To qualify as a beneficiary of its food banks – recipients are allowed to fetch the aid on a once-per-week rhythm – the Restos du cœur calculates their income set against their expenditure (rent, energy bills etc.). The calculations are made on a seasonal basis, for wintertime and, more restrictively, the summer. The winter campaign in general sees 30% more beneficiaries than during the summer. For this coming winter, the number of meals that are distributed to single people will drop from nine per week to seven, and for families it will drop from six to four per week for each member.
For the association’s volunteers, the reduction in aid is a sensitive issue. Gérard Farges, who manages the Restos du cœur food bank in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, said they are reluctant to talk now about the changes “for fear of generating further anxiety to people whose fragile situation is already critical”. He said that on top of the reduction in food distribution and the numbers of people served, he is concerned that the quality of the food items handed out will be significantly less, when some, like dairy products, may become “optional”.
The government’s smoke and mirrors
Just hours after Douret revealed on Sunday to TF1 the dire financial straits of the association, social solidarity minister Aurore Bergé appeared on the channel’s evening news programme to announce that “it will be 15 million euros that will be put on the table in a specific manner to help them [the Restos du cœur] get through this period”. Bergé, a former leader of the parliamentary group of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, said the emergency aid package would avoid people being turned away from the association’s distribution points, adding that it was “out of the question” that such a situation should arise.
But the 15 million euros of aid, despite the minister’s insistence, is neither “specific” nor completely dedicated to helping the association to “get through this period”. In fact, 10 of the 15 million euros was already planned to be given to the Restos du cœur as part of a government programme called “Better eating for all” which was launched in March. Restos du cœur spokesman Yves Merillon said the government money “is not for absorbing the supplementary amount of people who we should be receiving”.
Contacted by Mediapart, Bergé’s ministry confirmed that “10 to 12 million euros are [already] allocated for the ‘Better eating for all’ programme”, which means that the emergency aid for the association therefore amounts to just 5, or possibly 3, million euros.
Meanwhile, in a statement released on Tuesday, Aurore Bergé announced that the government will have this year given 156 million euros to various associations to be used for food aid, which she said was a total of more than double the amount provided three years ago. The Restos du cœur underlined that that sum is not handed out each year, adding that “since Covid, because there are many difficulties to meet budgets, [the associations] received exceptional aid from the state”. It is those emergency packages which explain the two-fold increase in aid over the past three years.
It is not only the Restos du cœur which faces severe financial problems. The French branch of the Red Cross on Monday revealed that it foresees a budget deficit this year of between 40 and 45 million euros. All of which is to a backdrop of what Julien Meimon, the head of an association called Linkee, which distributes food aid to students, describes as “a manifest social emergency”.
“We’re going to see other crises among associations,” Meimon warned, and included his own association among them. “The rise in attendance is so explosive that I don’t know how we’ll keep going.” For not only is demand for food aid growing, the costs of food, equipment and energy have risen sharply, and continue to rise.
The federation France générosités, an umbrella body for charitable associations and foundations which include the Red Cross and the French federation of food banks, estimates that the rise in the numbers of people requesting food aid rose by 7% in the first quarter of 2023, while donations given to its members fell over the same period by 3.9% (after adjustment for inflation).
Amid this morose picture, Meimon said the alarm sounded by the Restos du cœur, one of the largest associations involved in food distribution, was “welcome”, one which he says he hopes will send a productive wake-up call over the deepening crisis at hand.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse