PARIS, France (Reuters) — France plans to increase fines for food firms that do not publish annual results.
It’s part of government efforts to bring transparency to price talks blamed for hurting farmers.
The government has been struggling to deal with a downturn in meat and dairy markets that has prompted protests from livestock farmers in the past few months.
French farmers say low market prices for meat and dairy products, partly due to a Russian embargo on western food and a decline in Chinese dairy imports, are exacerbated by tough annual price negotiations between food processors and retailers.
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Agriculture minister Stephane Le Foll has singled out Bigard, France’s biggest beef processor and a major pork producer, and Europe’s largest dairy group Lactalis for not releasing their results, which he said hampers efforts to determine margins along the food chain.
As part of a bill on financial transparency and corruption, the government has proposed stiffer penalties for farm and food industry companies that fail to disclose results. These would be a fine of up to two percent of their daily sales in France for each day after the deadline for publishing the results.
French companies, including privately held family firms such as Bigard and Lactalis, are required to file their results to a local business court within two months of their approval at a shareholder meeting.
An online court registry of French company filings showed that Bigard had declared group results up to its 2013 financial year, while Lactalis had not filed results since at least 2011. The companies’ corporate websites showed total annual sales of $6.4 billion for Bigard and $25 billion for Lactalis, without specifying the year or giving other financial results.
Penalties already exist for non-disclosure of company results, but the farm ministry says these are not severe enough to affect big companies.
The European Union recently agreed to additional support measures for the bloc’s dairy and pork sectors following intense lobbying by France, the EU’s largest agricultural economy.
However, analysts said it could take time for farm level prices to recover, given oversupply in Europe and high dairy stocks in China, which had previously driven global dairy demand.
