FRANCE: Despite wheat prices falling, the French baguette is likely to stay expensive
Record ID:
739520
FRANCE: Despite wheat prices falling, the French baguette is likely to stay expensive
- Title: FRANCE: Despite wheat prices falling, the French baguette is likely to stay expensive
- Date: 17th May 2008
- Summary: VARIOUS OF BREAD
- Embargoed: 1st June 2008 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: France
- Country: France
- Topics: Economic News,Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
- Reuters ID: LVA51R3GOH69MWS9ZVYQTWHIQBT4
- Story Text: The baguette, a French staple that has become a symbol of soaring food costs, is unlikely to see its price decline even if wheat keeps falling from its record highs, according to bakers.
The cost of living is a hot topic at the moment with people increasingly struggling to face the soaring of food prices, including the humble baguette.
"The baguette is too expensive, it's incredible, much too expensive," said Martine, a Parisian. "We have no choice but to buy bread, so we buy it but it's very hard for the people who have little money."
To make the long sticks of white bread sold to 10 million French customers each day, bakers need to buy flour but also pay wages, energy bills and rents. The prices of all these have surged, bakers said at the start of a bread festival in Paris.
Jacques Mabille, head of the Parisian Bakers' Group, said the cost of wheat was only part of the problem. "The price of flour has increased by 27 percent, which is relatively small compared to the wheat increase, and at the end of the chain, the bread which has increased by 5 to 6 percent. I think that every middle man has tried to limit the increase of the prices of their products."
French millers and bakers have been blaming each other for the rise in bread prices.
Bread prices were fixed by the government until 1987 in France but bakers are now free to set the price they want.
Overall in Paris, baguettes now cost between five and eight percent more than last year, according to the Parisian Bakers' Group.
"The baguette is not expensive because we are a handcraft industry, there's a lot of work to make a baguette," said bread-maker Bernard Delsuquet, who has a bakery in the south of France. "For 80 cents, which is the average price of a classical baguette, you feed two people in a day over three meals and itup costing 15 cents per person."
Even if bread consumption has fallen drastically in France in the last century -- the French only eat 140 grams of bread a day against 800 grams in 1900 -- its price rise this year has become a symbol of more expensive shopping baskets.
In many other parts of the world the surge of grains prices to historic highs triggered protests, strikes and riots, causing the deaths of dozens of people. The benchmark US wheat price almost trebled between March 2007 and March this year.
Global wheat prices have come down from their record highs over the last two months on prospects of bumper crops but they are still around a third higher than last year, supported by rising demand for food and grain-based biofuels.
It is unlikely that bread prices will follow. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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