The Economist 04Apr2020

26 Europe The EconomistApril 4th 2020

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Marseille. Neighbouring countries have

also taken patients from eastern France.

France’s administrative structure has

also enabled it to impose and enforce con-

finement unapologetically. The day after

lockdown was announced, the central

bureaucracy had, naturellement, drawn up a

new form, which each individual must

sign to justify any trip out of the home.

Policemen and gendarmes, patrolling the

near-empty streets, parks and beaches,

have since carried out a staggering 5.8m

checks on such paperwork and imposed

359,000 fines. There has been scarcely a

murmur at this, nor at the government’s

“state of health emergency” law which,

among other things, gives it powers to con-

trol prices of certain products and requisi-

tion stocks. Old habits die hard.

The emergency also makes use of the

existing command-lines of a centralised

bureaucracy. Among his measures to sup-

port workers and businesses, Bruno Le

Maire, the finance minister, included a

“partial unemployment” scheme to help

firms avoid redundancies, under which the

state pays 84% of employees’ wages. De-

spite initial wrinkles, it already covers

3.6m employees. Indeed the French seem

to be reconnecting enthusiastically with

their inner Jean-Baptiste Colbert, finance

minister to Louis XIV. On a visit to a medi-

cal-mask factory on March 31st, Mr Macron

declared that “the day after won’t look like

the days before” and that it was now crucial

“to produce more in France”. Even the cosy,

unloved Parisian elite, which usually

meets over dinner in parquet-floored sa-

lons, has become a handy network, as

bosses of luxury firms and car-parts mak-

ers turn factories over to the health effort.

Yet in other ways France is also discov-

ering the shortcomings of such a system.

One is that the centrally made decisions

can be wrong. Take the shortage of masks.

Back in 2012, thanks to disaster planning,

France had a stockpile of 1.4bn medical

masks. By the time the covid-19 crisis be-

gan, however, that stock had dwindled to

just 140m. The reason was a change of strat-

egy, which proved flawed, to rely instead

on contracts to import rapidly from China

and elsewhere.

Another is that it can hinder local initia-

tive. Next to Germany, for example, the

French are lagging on testing. Germany’s

decentralised health system seems to have

helped encourage the rapid development

of tests in different laboratories around the

country, as well as their early use. “The Na-

poleonic question is really important,”

says François Heisbourg, of the Founda-

tion for Strategic Research, who was in-

volved in France’s disaster planning 15

years ago: “On testing, we have seen a beau-

tiful centralised system failing abjectly.”

Moreover a centralised administration

relies on high levels of trust, since there are

few alternative sources of authority. Yet

public trust also requires patience, which

is hard to manage in an emergency. This

has been clear during a row over the use of

chloroquine to treat covid-19, advocated by

Didier Raoult, a microbiologist in Mar-

seille. Even as the French central health au-

thority expressed doubts, long queues ap-

peared on the pavement outside his clinic.

Olivier Véran, the health minister, initially

kept to protocol by announcing that

chloroquine would not be approved before

undergoing full clinical tests. As public im-

patience mounted, on March 26th he de-

cided to authorise its use for covid-19 pa-

tients in certain circumstances anyway.

It is a sobering moment for a country

with a first-class health system and one of

the highest life expectancies in the world.

France is hoping that confinement will be-

gin to slow the rate of admissions to inten-

sive care to a manageable level while orders

of extra equipment, including much-need-

ed ventilators, come through. In the mean-

time, hospitals are doing what they can.

And Paris, where the streets are as empty as

intensive-care units are full, is steeling it-

self for the worst. 7

N

o song captures the mood of Ger-

many in spring quite like the 1930 hit

“Veronika, the spring is here”: “The girls

are singing tra-la-la, the whole world is en-

chanted. Veronika, the asparagus is sprout-

ing!” April in Germany is Spargelzeit, or “as-

paragus time”. Purists race to farm stalls to

buy the freshest stalks (white, unlike the

green summer variety), and serve it up with

sliced ham and hollandaise sauce or with

breadcrumbs and butter. But this year

much of the crop will rot in the fields. Bor-

der restrictions to fight covid-19 are keep-

ing the eastern European agricultural

workers who help to pick it at home.

Germany normally employs 30,000 sea-

sonal farmhands for the asparagus harvest,

with 5,000 in the state of Brandenburg

alone. So far in Brandenburg only about

half that number have arrived. Germany’s

border is open for Poles working in critical

sectors, but Polish farm workers hesitate to

cross it because their government says any

who do will be quarantined for 14 days on

their return. In late March, desperate as-

paragus farmers chartered a plane to fly in

190 Romanians. They nearly failed to get in:

on March 25th Germany barred seasonal

workers from countries that do not belong

to the Schengen border-free zone.

Asparagus is just the tip of a problem

that European farmers will soon face. Ger-

many will need almost 300,000 seasonal

farmhands this year. France, where straw-

berry season is approaching, needs

200,000 in the next three months; between

a third and two-thirds usually come from

abroad. The Netherlands is Europe’s big-

gest agricultural exporter, but most of the

workers who pick tomatoes and cucum-

bers in its greenhouses are from eastern

Europe, and many will not come this year.

Some industries can be put on hold, but

not agriculture. On March 30th the Euro-

pean Commission laid out principles to

make sure crucial employees, including

BEELITZ AND WARSAW

Covid-19 is keeping vegetable-pickers at home

European agriculture

Farmhands needed