When President Emmanuel Macron repeatedly declared “war” on the coronavirus in March, he solemnly promised that France would support “front-line” health workers with “the means, the protection”, reports The New York Times.
The reality was that France was nearly defenseless.
The government’s flip-flopping policies on past pandemics had left a once formidable national stockpile of face masks nearly depleted. Officials had also outsourced the manufacturing capacity to replenish that stockpile to suppliers overseas, despite warnings since the early 2000s about the rising risks of global pandemics.
That has left France — unlike Germany, its rival for European leadership — dependent on foreign factories and painfully unable to ramp up domestic production of face masks, test kits, ventilators and even the thermometers and over-the-counter fever-reducing medicines to soothe the sick.
Today, as it has begun loosening one of the world’s strictest lockdowns, France has become a case study in how some countries are now reconsidering their dependence on global supply chains built during the past two decades on the mantra of low costs and quick delivery. Even now, France has no guarantees that it can secure enough supplies in the coming weeks to protect against a potential second wave of the virus.
“In times of crisis, we can no longer switch from one production zone to another to get our essential products,” Louis Gautier, the former director of the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security, a powerful inter-ministerial unit inside the prime minister’s office that coordinates the response to large-scale crises, said in an interview. “The issue of strategic stocks and secure supplies has to be reconsidered. A new model has to be invented.”
France had long identified masks as indispensable in a pandemic, yet the government had mostly stopped stockpiling them during the past decade, mainly for budgetary reasons. Domestic production collapsed at the same time the country’s pharmaceutical industry was also moving overseas.
France had decided “that it was no longer necessary to keep massive stocks in the country, considering that production plants were able to be operational very quickly, especially in China,” the health minister, Olivier Véran, said in Parliament in March.
But the scope and speed of the coronavirus defied that logic. Still reeling from its own outbreak, China, the world’s leading maker of masks, was overwhelmed with orders. India, a top exporter of medication, temporarily banned exports for fear of shortages.
As the globalized supply chain broke down, French health officials lost critical time as the national government — as well as cities, towns and even wards — scrambled to buy supplies directly from China and elsewhere. The government organized highly publicized airlifts of masks from China, betraying both its desperation and its dependence.
France has suffered more than 27,000 deaths and one of the world’s highest fatality rates, 60 percent greater than in the United States.
“We will have to rebuild France’s agricultural, health, industrial and technological independence,” Mr. Macron said in a recent address.
To many critics, France’s defenselessness in face of the virus was the logical conclusion of the hollowing out of France’s manufacturing base — a transformation that has deepened inequality and fueled violent protests, like the Yellow Vest movement.