Around a hundred beekeepers gathered this Thursday, November 30, in Paris, to raise awareness about their fate. It’s a paradox: while France consumes more honey than it produces, the stocks of these beekeepers are overflowing. They cannot sell their honey. The fault, they say, is cheap honey imports. And the war in Ukraine hasn’t helped anything.
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Report from Place de la République in Paris, Nicolas Feldmann
They put on their beekeeping suits and lie down on the ground, a way of showing that their profession is in mortal danger. Raphael Quintet is at the head of an operation in central France with six employees, 1,500 hives, and overflowing stocks of honey: “ I have 80% of my production which is in stock and which cannot find a buyer. I make around 80 tonnes of honey, that’s 400,000 euros in turnover, there, I sold for 100,000 euros. »
Imported honey three times cheaper
For these beekeepers, it is impossible to fight against the prices of imported honey; traders buy it up to three times cheaper than French production. Laurence Marandola, spokesperson for the Peasant Confederation, protests: “ For profit reasons, traders and distributors mainly source their supplies from abroad, buying foreign honey for less than 2 euros, when here we consider that no beekeeper should have to sell their honey for less than 6 .5 euros per kg. »
Saturated market “
A trend reinforced over the past two years and the war in Ukraine, she says: “ The European Union, to support Ukraine, has decided to exempt this country from customs duties on agricultural products, this also concerns honey. And today we have massive arrivals of honey from Eastern Europe into France. This is not a problem, except to the extent that it has saturated the market and pushed prices towards the amounts of honey purchased from producers which are scandalous and do not allow farmers to survive. »
The Peasant Confederation is calling for emergency aid and is calling for the establishment of a minimum price on imported honey to protect French beekeepers.