After several weeks of procrastination, and amid a continuing sharp rise in the national consumer price index, the French government has announced it is to provide a one-off payment to the country’s lowest income earners at the end of this summer, the first step in a two-pronged emergency plan to help the poorest in face of fast-rising inflation, and notably the cost of food.
France’s national institute for statistics and economic studies, INSEE, estimates that the consumer price index rose, year-on-year, by 5.2% in May – the definitive figure will be published next week – following a 4.8% rise in April.
That reflected a 28% hike in energy prices last month, when in parallel food prices rose by 4.2%, costs of services by 3.2%, and the prices of manufactured goods went up by 2.9%.
“There are two stages to this plan,” announced Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, speaking on radio station France Bleu on Tuesday. “One stage, in [the] urgency with inflation, will be aid paid directly into the [household] bank account, in one go, naturally taking into account the number of children in the family.”
A second measure, under study by the government and which remains to be detailed, is the creation of a regular, long-term aid for low-income households which is specifically for the purchase of food, what Borne called a “chèque alimentation”, or food cheque, but which could in fact take the form of a payment card.
“We want to provide a response to the most [financially] modest with a ‘food cheque’ that will be put in place in the framework of the draft emergency law on purchasing power,” said Borne. That draft legislation is to be submitted before Parliament after this month’s legislative elections.
For Borne, who was appointed prime minister after Emmanuel Macron’s re-election as president in April, and her government, the issue of purchasing power will weigh heavily in the elections, when Macron’s re-named centre-right Renaissance party (the former LREM) faces a serious challenge, from the Left and the Right, to its parliamentary majority.
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In a separate move, Borne said her government will study the feasibility of “a targeted measure to allow all the French people to have access to quality [food] products, organic products”.
The Secours Catholique, one of France’s leading charitable associations providing aid to the poor, gave a cautious welcome to the one-off payment announced by Borne. “It will allow those concerned to play for time, even if it remains insufficient,” said Marie Drique, in charge of the charity’s “dignified access to food” programme, who underlined that paying for food is a balancing act for the tight budgets many people live with. “The context exacerbates the difficulties for access to food in sufficient quantity and quality.”
Meanwhile, at a press conference on Tuesday, Christiane Lambert, president of France’s largest farmers’ union, the FNSEA, called for the payment of public aid amounting to at least 3 euros per day and per person for the lowest income earners in France, which her union estimated would concern around 5.5 million people. “Food has never been cheaper, but at the same time, there has never been so many in food [access] precarity,” said Lambert, who suggested financial aid could be delivered by a specially dedicated banking card or cheque which would allow the purchase of “any kind of food product” and encourage “the purchase of local products”.
The provision of regular financial aid in the form of a “food cheque” for the most needy was the subject of a joint study last autumn by France’s social affairs inspectorate, IGAS, the inspectorate of finances, the IGF, and the agriculture ministry’s general council for food, agriculture and rural areas, the CGAAER.
Their final report, following consultations with bodies active in delivering food aid and with representatives from the agricultural sector, has never been made public, but Mediapart gained access to a summary of their findings. These identified a population of between 7 and 8 million people in need of help for proper access to food, but they warned that the conditions of providing such help would “restrict the choice of products, which places strain on the acceptability of the aid”, while “the capacity for effective controls are limited”.
The co-study also underlined that there existed no organisational body capable of leading such a programme, which would also be costly to implement. It estimated that a long-term, regular provision of a food cheque “would represent an annual cost of between 1.5 billion and 3.5 billion euros” in direct aid, and a managerial budget of between 75 million euros and 115 million euros, according to the numbers of beneficiaries and the sums they would receive.
However, the three agencies did propose that a regular financial aid for food purchases be experimented at a local, département (county) level over a period of three years, after which the results would be evaluated by a scientific committee.
Meanwhile, Claude Baland, president of the French federation of food banks, the FFBA, foresees other problems. “It will be difficult to pursue all the aims at the same time – to improve the quality and diversity of food for the most [socially] fragile, to offer farmers supplementary outlets without excluding the large supermarkets, and all the while not [adopting] a food injunction,” he said. “The government is in a contradictory position, which is why it is so complicated.”
His federation is nevertheless willing to take part in a programme of direct financial aid for food, but he questions the practical implementation of the financial aid: “If it is decided that it would be distributed in the form of a magnetic card, who is it given to? On what criteria? Where can purchases be made with such a card? Only in short supply chains, or could the beneficiaries go into large supermarkets where they can only buy certain types of food products? Will these retailers be accessible to everyone in terms of transport?”
For Marie Drique, from the Secours Catholique, other solutions are possible. “In face of the situation, we could go further with putting into place a guaranteed minimum income,” she said. “We have established that fifty percent of the median standard of living is required to be able to live in a dignified manner, considering [this to be] a food budget of seven euros per day and per person. It is for that reason that to combat structural [social] precarity we argue for a guaranteed minimum income of 920 euros per month. But if the government considers that this long-term food ‘cheque’ is the way to go, we have several propositions to make.”
Drique said she was in favour of its experimentation in the absence of other measures, and that those concerned should be involved in the monitoring and evaluation of its results, but that it represents “the tree that hides the forest” regarding policies for a transition towards wider access to sustainable and quality food supply. “A targeted cheque doesn’t replace an ambitious transition policy,” Drique insisted.
“Magnetic cards don’t provide [social] inclusion and relationships,” added Claude Baland. “With the food banks, we organise, for example, cooking classes aimed at tackling waste or diabetes. We wouldn’t want them to disappear with this cheque.”
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse