France's halal market grows

Some French politicians have seized on the spread of halal food to win votes. Producers selling their wares at Paris's annual Muslim food fair are much more sure it will bring something else: profit. France's halal market, now estimated at 5.5 billion euros with about 10 percent annual growth, became a political issue in recent weeks as President Nicolas Sarkozy used it in an unabashed pitch for votes from the anti-immigrant far-right.
The raw facts about halal butchering became a top issue on the election campaign trail, to the point that Sarkozy's prime minister, Francois Fillon, said halal and kosher slaughter were outdated "ancestral traditions" that should be scrapped. That hit a raw nerve in France's Muslim and Jewish communities - both the largest of their kind in Europe - whose leaders complained openly. The issue has since mostly faded from the campaign for the two-round presidential election, which ends on May 6.
"It was a lot of noise for nothing," said Aissa Osmane, who sells sharia-compliant spaghetti sauces with halal beef in the bolognese and smoked poultry cubes for bacon in the carbonara. The halal market can only grow as the 5-million strong Muslim community further integrates into French life, said the businessman from the Paris suburb of Villetaneuse.
"Muslims live in today's world like everybody else, they're busy and want ready-made foods," he said. Marine Le Pen, head of the anti-immigrant National Front party, launched the verbal food fight in February when she said all meat sold in the Paris region was halal, and accused Sarkozy of bowing to Muslim pressure to allow this. While this was an exaggeration, the debate revealed that abattoirs in the Paris region slaughtered animals exclusively the halal way - without stunning them before slitting their throats - but didn't always mark meat as halal if it were sold to non-Muslim shops.
Halal foods on display included Dutch, Danish and Turkish meats, Belgian yoghurt, British baby food, Indonesian nasi goreng, Malaysian sweet and sour sauce, alcohol-free champagne from Belgium and Austria, and a whisky-flavoured malt drink from the United States.