Cut to the Bone: Farmers at the mercy of the meat monopolists - Lighthouse Reports

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Cut to the Bone: Farmers at the mercy of the meat monopolists

NEWSROOM: FOOD SYSTEMS

Co-published with

Credit: Solène Reveney for Le Monde

CREDITS

Margot Gibbs, Charles Boutaud, Eva Constantaras, Raphaëlle Aubert, Emmanuel Freudenthal, Elsa Delmas, Guillaume Daudin

METHODOLOGY

How we measured consolidation in France’s cattle industry from the farmer’s perspective

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...