France Tries to Rebalance Power Between Farmers, Manufacturers and Supermarkets — Opens a Faucet That Drains Almost Nothing

Picture a faucet opened with the belief it would water a drought-stricken field, only to leave behind a barely visible puddle six years later. That image comes to mind when closing the latest Senate report on laws intended to boost French farmers’ income. Passed in 2018 amid a climate of social urgency, the Egalim law promised to rebalance the power dynamics between producers, manufacturers, and large retailers. Today, the numbers arrive—cold and unforgiving: the extra money generated by the scheme simply never reached the farms. A look back at a mechanism that was supposed to change everything and that perfectly illustrates the gulf between the legislator’s intent and the reality on the ground.

A Law Passed to Save Farmers: Six Years of Silence in the Accounts

In 2018, the agricultural crisis was no longer merely a topic of debate; it spilled onto the streets, onto roundabouts, and into tractors blocking roads. Faced with this anger, public authorities voted the Egalim law, with a straightforward objective on paper: to allow farmers to live decently from their work, by rebalancing the commercial negotiations that put them often in a weak position against the retail giants. Six years later, the assessment by the senators is unequivocal. A review report delivered in May 2024 points to a troubling reality: it is impossible for distributors to justify the use of the surplus turnover generated since 2019 by the raising of the loss-leader threshold.

In other words, the money was indeed collected, but no one really knows where it went. This blur is not trivial: it reflects the complete lack of traceability of a scheme meant to trickle upstream to agriculture. Barely a year after the law’s adoption, a first Senate report in 2019 already recalled that a third of farmers earned less than 350 euros per month, revealing that Egalim targeted only a small portion of what actually constitutes the income of farm operators. The problem was identified from the start, but the remedy never truly took hold.

Egalim, the Mechanism That Was Supposed to Change Everything and Changed Nothing

To grasp the scale of the failure, we must revisit the technical principle of the device, named SRP+10%. The idea was simple: by artificially raising the threshold for selling at a loss, retailers would be prevented from dumping certain foods at rock-bottom prices, which should have created an extra margin. This margin, in theory, would then trickle to the agro-food manufacturers, and then to the producers themselves, in a virtuous cascade effect. On paper the chain appeared coherent. In practice, it jammed at the first link.

The senators, skeptical since 2018 about the real feasibility of this spillover, were right. No tangible proof has ever emerged showing that the extra money captured by distribution ends up in farmers’ pockets. A Senate investigative commission, chaired by Anne-Catherine Loisier, quantified this observation: for every 100 euros spent on food, only 8 euros return to farmers, versus 40 euros captured by the large retailers. That gap, by itself, encapsulates the inverted mechanism of a system meant to benefit those who produce, but that primarily enriches those who distribute.

Where Does the Money Go When It Does Not Reach the Producers

If the money doesn’t climb back to the farms, it has to go somewhere. The Senate report sketches a revealing map of this value leakage. Five major distribution groups alone account for 83% of the sector by the end of 2024, against a backdrop of roughly 17,500 agro-food companies made up mostly of small suppliers with little negotiating power. This structural imbalance naturally favors the most powerful players, who manage to capture the value created by the new regulations rather than redistribute it upstream in the chain.

The eggs sector illustrates this phenomenon almost caricaturally. For eggs from caged hens, the farmer receives only 20.2% of the value, compared with 47.9% captured by distribution. The paradox becomes even clearer for organic products, where the farmer’s share essentially becomes zero, while distribution alone captures 85.1% of the added value. Another dark spot noted by the senators: some distributors circumvent French laws by passing through buying centers based in Luxembourg, Belgium, or the Netherlands, thus escaping Egalim’s constraints on national territory. The cost of international service agreements imposed on manufacturers rose from 780 million euros in 2019 to 1.1 billion euros in 2024, evidence that commercial pressure intensified rather than eased.

On the controls side, the DGCCRF nonetheless increased its interventions upstream in agriculture, with a rise of 75% between 2022 and 2023. But the investigative commission regrets a too formal appraisal of contracts, which checks administrative compliance without truly ensuring that the commitments translate into farmers’ accounts.

What the Egalim Failure Reveals About the Future of French Farmers

Beyond remuneration figures, the entire French food sovereignty appears to have weakened during these six years of implementation. The country’s agricultural trade balance deteriorated by 49% between 2019 and 2024, dropping from 7.7 billion to 3.9 billion euros. This decline signals a worrying loss of competitiveness in a context where France, long regarded as the leading European agricultural power, sees its position erode year after year.

This finding raises deep questions about how public policies are designed, voted on, and evaluated. A law can display the best intentions in the world, but if it is not accompanied by sufficiently robust monitoring tools, it risks becoming a mere statement of intent, with no real effect on the ground. In the fall, as the annual commercial negotiations between retailers and manufacturers approach, this Senate report rings as an additional alarm signal in a sector already marked by recurring tensions and growing distrust among the various links in the food chain.

Six years after Egalim’s adoption, the paradox remains intact: never have so many texts been voted to protect farmers’ income, and never has their economic situation seemed so precarious. Between spillover promises that fail to spill over and discreetly thriving bypass routes, the question must be asked plainly: how many more Senate reports will it take before an agricultural law finally translates, in practice, into one more euro in the bank accounts of those who feed the country?