France is such a strange country sometimes. Don’t tell me - you already know!
Here, there is hardly a week without a row between the different ‘families’ that make up the fresh produce industry. The latest illustrates how the relationship has soured between domestic producers and Interfel, the inter-professional body that represents the whole industry.
The first sector to shoot was the French table-grape producers’ union. In a fierce letter, it accused Interfel of being nothing more than the obedient pet dog of the big retailers.
The origin of this complaint was the difficult commercial situation experienced by producers this autumn. The poor weather certainly didn’t help them to boost sales and fruit was hanging around on shelves.
As is common in France, the struggling producers were waiting for Interfel to act in their favour, or in other words to protect their interests. As that has not happened as they imagined, they now feel betrayed somehow by the perceived lack of action from the industry body.
As you might expect, Interfel president Gilles Vignaud was quick to respond to the accusation. He reminded grape producers, and anyone else who was listening for that matter, that market management was not in the decision-making sphere of Interfel.
In a similar vein, he said that working groups inside Interfel (there is one for all major categories) are not the correct place to conduct a tug of war between members of the industry, but rather a place to share information in order to generate a common position.
And the grape working group has met 16 times in 17 weeks, so there has been plenty of opportunity for common ground to be discovered. Beyond the strife, which as I say, is not exactly unusual in French fresh produce politics, I believe this story epitomises how difficult it often is to find a consensus - even amongst people who appear to have good reason to be like-minded.
While France, as other countries in Europe, faces a global consumption crunch that does not exclude fresh produce, good sense would suggest that any the issues should be addressed with more discipline.
But this in itself is hard to find when everyone in the supply chain, retailers included (and they have remained extremely quiet on this subject, by the way) is intent on shouting louder than their neighbour.
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