A tempest in a yogurt carton.

last updated 8 January 2015

France

Jean-Claude Kiefer

They’re after our yogurt, said Jean-Claude Kiefer in Strasbourg’s Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace. Already, the government warns us, they’ve bought the vineyard that makes Taittinger champagne and the prestigious Crillon hotel. And now they want the “gem of French agribusiness,” Danone. “They,” of course, are “the Americans,” and in the eyes of the French political establishment, they represent “voracious capitalism—everything that starts with Mac- or ends with -Cola.” The government has worked itself into hysterics over rumors of a PepsiCo bid for Danone. No foreign owner, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin declared, could possibly share “our attachment to French workers, French industry, French research.” President Jacques Chirac proclaimed himself to be “vigilant and mobilized” against a takeover bid. Other countries are laughing at this “ridiculous and typically French” overreaction, as well they should. French companies such as France Télécom and Electricité de France have benefitted enormously by acquiring foreign subsidiaries. It’s only fair that such trade “should go both ways.”