Cut to the Bone: Farmers at the mercy of the meat monopolists
Co-published with
July 17, 2026
How state authorities put France’s farmers at the mercy of an industrial giant
France has long prided itself in high quality, sustainable farming practices that has earned it a reputation for world class artisanal agricultural products. Yet farming protests, which erupted in 2024, exposed a deep misgiving about the direction of food production in France.
Their pleas for intervention to preserve traditional French farming may have come far too late.
An investigation by Lighthouse Reports and Le Monde reveals that the forces currently forcing many small-scale French cattle producers out of business were set in motion decades ago, when competition authorities allowed a single industrial group to swallow up its rivals.
Our investigation reveals how competition authorities put French farmers at the mercy of family-owned industrial giant Groupe Bigard, which now slaughters more than one in every three cattle in France.
Thanks to those mergers, one in every five French farmers now faces slaughtering options within a reasonable driving distance that are so dominated by Groupe Bigard that they would generally be considered unlawful under French competition law.
Even if forced to drive further to slaughter cattle, which stresses animals and leads to reduced profits, more than half French farmers face a market which would raise competition concerns.
This loose regulation has paved the way for industrialized agriculture to take over the French cattle industry: farmers were forced to accept huge financial losses, subsidised by the tax payer, whilst Groupe Bigard raised its margins – and consumers paid more for their meat.
Antitrust scholar Professor Peter Carstensen describes such conditions as a “serious structural problem which is going to harm producers for sure”.
According to Austin Frerick, our findings show that the mergers were “devastating for French farmers” . He said they provided “a textbook example of what happens when competition authorities fail to do their jobs. They allowed the market structure to consolidate, squeezing farmers and gouging customers.
“It’s not just the farmers who are losing out here. The Competition Authority’s failure has resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from French taxpayers to a single corporation, Bigard, through subsidies required to cover these losses.“
METHODS
This investigation has endeavoured to understand how a handful of big French slaughterhouse firms, led by Bigard, ended up with so much power, which farms across France are most impacted, whether the concentration of market control is legal — and how this growing power may have harmed farmers.
To measure the changes to market concentration we linked several datasets obtained from the ministry of agriculture by FOI:
- The location, capacity and owners of the slaughterhouses
- The distribution of cattle farms across France, by administrative district
- How Bigard’s slaughterhouses had changed hands over the past 30 years
For each administrative district, we calculated key concentration metrics within three driving time ranges: 1h30, 2h30 and 4h, corresponding to roughly the 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles of travel times for beef cattle in France.
We then evaluated those metrics against thresholds used in competition law in different countries, and showed how those metrics changed due to mergers greenlit by the Competition Authority.
As far as measuring harms to farmers, we sought advice from competition experts. They told us that a hallmark of a company or group of companies being able to exert market power is an increase to the “price spread” – the difference between what supermarkets are charged for products and what farmers are paid. Where that metric increases, it suggests that slaughterhouses are squeezing farmers and gauging consumers.
We were able to obtain figures from France’s Price Observatory which confirmed exactly this trend between 2013 and 2019 – a period when cattle farmers’ losses were reaching their nadir. This analysis was not available for the earlier, pre-merger period, so we used a more approximate measure: the difference between consumer prices and the farmgate prices. They confirmed the same trend: whilst farmer prices were falling, consumer prices were rising.
We were then able to measure how this trend had been active at the corporate level: we analysed Groupe Bigard’s financial statements to measure how the company had benefited from its growing power: not only did the company’s profits increase five-fold between 2004 and 2023, but the main operating company’s profit margins more than doubled; and paid out €300 million in dividends over the last decade.
STORYLINES
Thierry Thil has been farming cattle, pigs, goats and free-range poultry, in the Moselle region, close to France’s borders with Germany and Luxembourg, for thirty years.
He works 70 hour weeks for €900 a month.
But as Bigard’s power has grown, Thierry’s mixed farm has become harder to maintain. As the industry giant acquired more slaughterhouses in the region, it closed some sites and moved others towards slaughtering just one single species – which supports company profits but not producers who maintain mixed farms.
As a result of Bigard’s changes, Thierry now has to take his animals across the border to Luxembourg, which is costly and heavy in administration. It also leaves him vulnerable: as happened last autumn when an outbreak of lumpy skin disease.
“It’s stressful taking an animal to the abattoir. You’ve no idea how stressful it is,” says Thierry.
Farmers, seeking an alternative to Bigard, planned to open an abattoir at Thionville, supported by Thil along with around 190 other farmers in the region. It would have been a lifeline. But just as they were supposed to sign the contract, the bank pulled out.
Martine Cordel, then “a very young elected representative on the Chamber of Agriculture” Thierry’s neighbour Martine Cordel was witness to the beginnings of Bigard’s takeover of what were previously farmer-owned abattoirs.
The slaughter industry “put pressure on the [farming] trade to sell its 50 per cent stake in the abattoir, threatening to leave Metz otherwise”, she recounts.
Martine maintains a short supply chain: the family farm sells its produce through short supply chains at L’Ayotte, the first farmers’ market to open in Moselle. She also backed the abattoir at Thionville, believing it would provide farmers like her an essential service. She lost €10,000 when the bank pulled out.
Bigard’s influence extends beyond the slaughterhouses. As Mayor of Autun, Remy Rebeyrotte, championed the re-establishment of the town’s abattoir. It now slaughters cattle from the local area and provides meat for public services and the town’s supermarkets. But Rebeyrotte says he experienced “hostility” about the project from some farmers attached to powerful co-operatives. Some belonged to a cooperative with close links to Bigard. Bernard Joly, former president of the abattoir, is convinced that the fear of Bigard prevented such co-operatives from supporting the abattoir.
Unless the French authority reforms its approach to regulating mergers and supporting sustainable agricultural practices, more and more farmers are going to face the decision about whether to go big or get out.
According to Frerick, the situation would only get worse unless authorities intervene. He said the French Competition Authority should re-evaluate the mergers it approved and implement policy changes to ensure such purchases are not allowed in the future.
According to Anne Witt, a professor of law at the EDHEC Business School, the Competition Authority’s failure to consider the impact on farmers is part of a wider culture in which competition authorities have focused primarily on protecting ‘consumer welfare’ whilst ignoring the broader context of the value chain. “Who cares if a company leaves the market as long as consumer welfare is not affected?”
There is evidence that trends may be shifting.
French competition scholars say the findings reveal issues that go beyond competition policy and merger-control. According to antitrust scholar Professor Walid Chaiehloudj, current competition policy has failed to provide sufficient protections to farmers and regulators should lower the thresholds at which they allow mergers to take place.
But he also suggests more radical reforms: that in order to properly serve the public,competition law should start to actively incorporate higher order objectives like food-sovereignty into its decision making.