Paris, May 6 - The baguette, a French staple that has become a symbol of soaring food costs, is unlikely to see its price decline even if wheat keeps falling from its record highs, bakers said on Tuesday.
To make the long white bread sold to 10 million French customers each day, bakers need to buy flour but also pay wages, energy bills and rents whose prices also surged, they said at the launch of a campaign to promote bread consumption.
"It's not only the price of wheat that makes prices swell, its all the other costs," Jean-Pierre Crouzet, head of the French bakers and pastrycooks said.
French millers and bakers have been blaming each other for the rise in bread prices.
Joseph Nicot, head of the French millers group, said flour prices have gained 20-25 percent in the last year. Since flour accounts for 15 percent of the baguette's total costs its rise should only have had a little impact on the baguette.
"Bakers are taking flour prices as an excuse," he said.
Jocelyn Lohezic, a 39-year old baker in Paris who makes around 1,000 baguettes on its busiest day, Saturday, said he had lifted the price of its main bread, the "baguette tradition", by 5 cents at the start of the year, the same amount as early 2007.
HIGHER COSTS
"There was no specific reason for the rise this year. It is due to a basket of reasons including higher flour prices but also higher rents, higher salaries, higher energy costs," he said, adding the increases had not impacted his sales.
"Even when prices rise people keep going to their local bakery. Why would the baker sell its bread at one euro if he knows that at 1.2 euro he would sell as many? Prices will keep rising, that's for sure," he added.
Bread prices were fixed by the government until 1987 in France but bakers are now free to set the price they want.
Overall in Paris, baguettes now cost between 5 and 8 percent more than last year, Jacques Mabille, head of the Parisian bakers group said.
Even if bread consumption has fallen drastically in France in the last century -- the French only eat 140 grams of bread a day against 800 grams in 1900 -- its price rise this year has become a symbol of more expensive shopping baskets.
In many other parts of the world the surge of grains prices to historic highs -- the benchmark US wheat price almost tribled between March 2007 and March this year -- triggered protests, strikes and riots, causing the deaths of dozens of people.
Global wheat prices have come off their record highs over the last two months on prospects of bumper crops but they are still around a third higher than last year, supported by rising demand for food and grain-based biofuels.
It is unlikely that bread prices will follow.
"The price of the baguette has never dropped while wheat prices have," the French bakers group said in a statement.