The Government welcomes the agreement reached in France with the distribution so that supermarkets offer a basket of basic products at reduced prices for a quarter, but, for the moment, rules out promoting a similar agreement in Spain and leaves it up to the companies in the sector adopting measures to contain prices at the expense of their margins.
The Second Vice President of the Government and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, welcomed an agreement that she has been promoting in our country for months. While the Minister of Agriculture and main interlocutor of the sector, Luis Planas, described the news beyond the Pyrenees as "positive". Specifically, Planas referred to the Carrefour initiative, which has launched an "anti-inflation basket" in the French country with 200 products at a frozen price and assured that a "mature and competitive sector like the Spanish one is perfectly in a position to carry out similar measures" to contain prices "to the extent possible, within their business performance."
In this way, the socialist area of the coalition closes the door, at least for now, to promoting a 'French-style' agreement from the Government and invites the companies themselves to analyze the feasibility of launching similar initiatives. From Agriculture they insist that the French Government is not capping prices, but that it is the companies that are making "voluntary decisions" in exchange for the French Executive reopening in June the negotiation of tariffs between manufacturers and distribution chains for guarantee that the reduction in production costs is transferred to supermarkets in compensation for the loss of margins they suffer due to price containment.
Emmanuel Macron's strategy is for large retailers to participate in the national effort to deal with galloping inflation in a context of great social tension due to the pension reform, but avoiding direct intervention in the market -as the flank proposes here purple of the coalition -, a path that seems passable for Minister Planas.
Although the minister has publicly expressed his support for the Carrefour initiative in France, the group is cautious about the possibility of reaching a similar agreement with the Spanish government and, consulted by EL MUNDO, they limit themselves to indicating that "each country is free to decide its trade policy.
Likewise, in the large distribution chains that operate in Spain, for the moment, they avoid pronouncing before the initiative of the competition. Although sources in the sector advance the reluctance of supermarkets to launch a basic shopping basket, with reduced and limited prices.
The sector rejects the initiative for several reasons: first, because in France it was already demonstrated, during the Nicolas Sarkozy government, that the measures to freeze prices were carried out at the cost of reducing the quality of the products, which led to significant reputational damage for the sector; second, because they consider that the basic and capped shopping baskets are "discriminatory" because they do not reach all consumers or distributors, as is the case of smaller municipalities that do not have a large company nearby or of emptied Spain; and third, because the Law of the Food Chain obliges to accept increases from suppliers that are based on objective increases in costs, so it would remain up in the air who assumes the increase in case of freezing, and in this sense, they remember that The Government has asked the entire food chain to make an effort, not just distribution.
Other sources in the sector also recall that the meeting of the food chain observatory took place recently, where Minister Planas gave supermarkets a boost by framing the high inflation of food as a problem of costs and advanced that the CPI of the The shopping basket "has already reached its ceiling" and will begin to reflect the moderation in energy and raw material costs in the coming months.
If just two weeks ago the head minister of the branch defended the measures adopted by the Executive, such as the reduction of VAT on some foods, direct aid to the agricultural sector of 660 million euros or the check of 200 euros for vulnerable families, this Monday , after learning of the agreement reached in France, Planas invited the distribution chains in Spain to launch similar offers to lower prices at the expense of their margins.
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