Covid and lockdown weigh on the table of French luxury

 - Champagne and fois gras, two symbols of luxury at the table and French bien vivre, overshadowed by Covid.
The pandemic has amplified the problems with the closure of restaurants in early 2020, which represents a "real risk for the 100,000 direct and indirect jobs affected", underlines the Cifog, the interprofession of the French foie gras, duck breast and confit, which represents the set of professional breeders, breeders, feed suppliers, breeders, slaughterhouses, processors.

A sword of Damocles that returns to sink a sector that had been able to reconvert itself, with investments also in terms of animal welfare, after the avian flu in 2016 and 2017 and the criticism of animal rights activists who led New York to ban the consumption of foie gras in 2019. The transalpine sector responded by recalling that the ancestral character of forced feeding, a practice born under the Egyptians and perpetuated by the Romans.

In addition, in the face of competition from foie gras, in particular Bulgarian and Hungarian, a "France brand" was also recently created which guarantees the origin of its products and its biosecurity practices, with the support of 10,000 chefs, with the goal of developing exports and recovering the 10% drop in sales of foie gras and duck breast recorded at home last year, also due to new provisions that aim to regulate promotions in supermarkets.

Meanwhile, the maison de Champagne also see it gray, which in recent days have managed to reach an agreement with the winemakers to lower the yield of the grapes to 8 thousand kg per hectare in the 2020 harvest. The request for control of the offer by the maison based on the estimated drop in champagne sales in 2020, around 100 million bottles and the disproportionate size of stocks, more than one billion bottles still in stock. (HANDLE).