My initial plan in writing this month’s column was to take a lighter tone and talk about a summery topic. Rungis market has often been used for movie and TV shoots, and it would have been interesting to consider how this fits into the wholesale market’s overall promotional efforts. Imagine a crimes series being shot in a wholesale market - perhaps an episode of Wire in the Blood set in the alleys of Smithfield, or Rosemary and Thyme culminating one of their investigations in the flower hall at New Covent Garden.

But sadly, while it may be summer, there is no holiday for the industry. The rotten weather in this country has impacted on consumption of summer fruit, especially peaches and nectarines, leaving producers in turmoil and looking to the government for help and guidance.

In France we have a strange tax, which I have mentioned in this column before, called the co-efficient multiplier: it is designed for use in just this kind of crisis situation, for a limited time, and means that an extra percentage is added to the product price - the percentage changing depending on what part of the industry you are dealing with.

The implementation of this tax is a typically French administrative procedure: there are no less than eight different percentages, depending on if you are a distributor, a wholesaler working on a market or a foodservice supplier, and so forth. It more or less guarantees the industry will be turned into a madhouse, and for some companies it could mean as much as a 30-50 per cent cut in their margins.

The government has never implemented the tax, presumably because of its dangerous political ramifications; and last July the industry received confirmation the tax would not be used. But then this year, the ministry of agriculture gave the green light to the procedure. The wholesale industry went ballistic, saying it would be prepared to leave interprofessional association Interfel and turn to Brussels for intervention if necessary.

Eventually, the ministry of economics decided not to allow the tax to be implemented and the pressure eased off. But the situation has certainly left some scars. Wholesalers are still extremely angry, as last year they were assured the tax would not be used. It was one of the keystones that led to pacification of the relations between upstream and downstream operations in 2006.

Even if there is no impact on the commercial side from this narrowly averted crisis, suspicion has wormed its way back into the corridors of the industry; and past experience has shown us that this has always been a powerful poison, considering the major differences in opinion on how the market should be run between a fruit producer in Lower Luberon and a wholesaler in Paris or Lyon.

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