PARIS (Reuters) -The French Agriculture Ministry said on Monday it would give the wine industry additional support of 130 million euros ($149.80 million) for the further uprooting of vines, to guard against excessive output, adding it would also ask the European Union to chip in.
“The sector is suffering from a deteriorating situation, marked by the effects of climate change, which have repeatedly affected harvests for several years, the continuing decline in wine consumption – particularly red wines – and major geopolitical tensions,” the ministry said in a statement.
France has subsidised the removal of vines to counter oversupply in the face of falling wine consumption, an approach criticised by some producers for making southern areas more vulnerable to wildfires.
French wine production is expected to rise 3% from last year’s rain-hit season but fall 13% from the five-year average as a heatwave and drought in August and smaller vine area cut output in some key regions, the farm ministry said in September.
“This new and very significant financial effort, despite a particularly difficult budgetary context and subject to the adoption of a finance bill, demonstrates the government’s determination to save our wine industry in the long term and enable it to bounce back,” Agriculture Minister Annie Genevard said in the statement.
($1 = 0.8678 euro)
(Reporting by Benoit Van Overstraeten in Paris; Editing by Matthew Lewi)
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