French press review 18 September 2013

The financial black hole that is the French social security budget gets front-page treatment in several of this morning's Paris dailies.

The state's spending overseer says we are paying too much for our spectacles and our hospital beds and it has to stop.

Glasses in France cost twice as much as the average in the four neighbouring countries and the nation's hospitals need to be reorganised to cut down on the wasteful duplication of some services.

Communist l'Humanité sees the whole thing as a plot to make the working man pay more for her social security.

Catholic La Croix gives pride of place to a new phase of the debate on retirement reform, to be considered by the French cabinet later today. Despite a theoretical Socialist adhesion to the idea that no one should have to work beyond the age of 60, economic and demographic realities are pushing many to the realisation that since we now live longer, spend more time in school and university and tend to age more slowly, maybe we might consider contributing to our pensions for a little while longer.

The crucial question, and the one the ministers will consider today, is whether it is fair to treat people doing really dangerous and physically demanding jobs on the same terms as guys who sit behind desks and read their emails all day. The idea is to create a sort of savings scheme, by means of which workers in psychologically or physically difficult jobs will be able to accumulate additional points towards an early retirement, without any loss of benefit. It sounds fair until you get down to the nitty-gritty of what constitutes a psychologically or physically demanding job.

They've tried a similar system in Holland, with little success on the definition of difficulty and a very short list of jobs which qualify . . . basically, any form of night work or jobs where you have to put in long hours.

Zimbabwe gets a mention inside Le Monde, not because President Robert Mugabe yesterday inaugurated the eighth session of parliament in Harare but because the World Food Programme (WFP) is worried about the food security of about one quarter of the rural population.

The WFP has warned that there's a risk that more than two million Zimbabweans won't have enough food to see them through to the next harvest, which is nearly seven months away, next April.

Four serious droughts since 2001 have depleted returns, particularly of the staple crop, maize.

The statistics are not universally regarded as alarming, some commentators suggesting that the WFP has a vested interest in exaggerating the potential danger to make it easier to squeeze funds out of governments whose aid budgets are being cut by the crisis.

Many critics of Mugabe are using this latest crisis, if crisis it really turns out to be, as a stick to bash the president's land redistribution scheme under which 6,000 white farmers were evicted and their land given to 245,000 black farmers. Food production did, indeed, drop following the handover but production levels are now back to 1990 levels and this despite a systematic refusal by the banks to advance loans for equipment and fertilisers to black borrowers.

As for the status of Zimbabwe as the former "bread-basket of Africa", that's a complete myth according to Professor Joseph Hanlon of the London School of Economics. He says that the country was a net importer of maize for seven of the 20 years before independence.