The best and worst of the world's eats

 Sudanese refugee mother has a daily struggle to feed her children in the Birak refugee camp, Chad. Photo by Cynthia Jones/World Food Program via Getty Images.

Fit, healthy Australians. Sleek, cycling Dutch. Icelanders living on dried fish.

Not so much, says a new survey, Good Enough to Eat, released Wednesday by Oxfam, compiled from data gathered by international organizations.

 It’s a global food index that weighs the most important factors of dietary health, including affordability, quantity, diversity and nutritiousness of food, as well as a country’s rate of obesity and diabetes. And it has turned up some surprising results.

Where's the best place to eat?

The Netherlands. And the much-touted French and Swiss come in second.

Canada ranks only 25th of 125 countries, thanks to growing obesity and “unhealthy eating.”

The problem is more than a plethora of poutine. “Even in a wealthy country like Canada there’s a big gap between what people need and what they get,” says Oxfam Canada’s Robert Fox, pointing out that aboriginal communities suffer most, and in Nunavut more than half of children live in food insecurity. Fox calls for a “national food policy” in Canada, and an overseas aid policy  that is focused on women food producers.

But food problems are often complex, the report points out.

While the Dutch have the highest overall rating  – and a well-known fondness for riding bicycles – they score lower on the obesity measure, with 19 per cent of people surveyed classed as fat. (Too many Dutch treats?)

Even worse is Australia, whose svelte beach bunny image is blown away by an obesity rate of 27 per cent. And 9 per cent of Australians also have diabetes.

At the very bottom of the unhealthy eating scale, strangely, are wealthy Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which rate an “F” for obesity and diabetes.

Icelanders, not noted for grand cuisine, rate at the top of the food quality and diet diversity scale, in spite of their limited farm land and relatively high food prices.

But sadly, it’s all too easy to predict those at the bottom end of the index.

Impoverished Chad – home to hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees – is lowest overall, with food that’s too little and too dear. It also has scant nutritional value, and is kept in unsanitary conditions. One child in three is underweight. 

Meanwhile Angola, also near the bottom of the scale, suffers the highest level of food price volatility, except for inflation-battered Zimbabwe. In Angola, “60 per cent of people’s diet is made up of simple carbohydrates and almost half the population do not have access to clean water” to prepare food safely.

In Burundi, a whopping 67 per cent of people are undernourished, and 35 per cent of children are underweight. A number of other African countries have scores that are little better.

One surprise: the worst score for underweight children is in “Asian tiger” India –  some  44 per cent of kids have lower than normal weight, making them vulnerable to stunting and learning disabilities.

“Inequality, weak distribution, failed markets and poor governance mean that people in many countries go to bed hungry, especially women,” says Oxfam, calling for “urgent reform of the way food is produced and distributed around the world to put an end to this scandal.”

Olivia Ward has covered countries from the former Soviet Union, Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards.

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NSA inside story: Big Brother blurts

Who has time to go jogging when you've got a bajillion emails to sort through....?

You read it here first: an exclusive interview with a covert, clandestine, undercover operative from the ultra-secret, shadowy, under-the-radar but much publicized U.S. National Security Agency.

Q: So dude. busy times?

A: Busy?  Can the Pope swim?  Is a duck Catholic? Are you kiddin' me?

Q: According to Edward Snowden and other leakers, you've been eavesdropping on 60 million Spaniards, 46 million Italians, millions of Brazilians and Mexicans. You've skimmed data from 70 million French phone records and bugged German Chancellor Angela Merkel even before she was in office.

A: So why do you think Eddie left the agency?

Q: You mean the ethical dilemma of snooping into so many people's private lives?

A: Geddoutahere! It was the overtime. You think we enjoy doing this?  Like, one minute you're hacking into a handful of would-be-terrorists' cellphones and the next you're sucking up every bleep and blurb that's sent out over every electronic signal. Think about it.

Q: So who planned this huge spy net?

A: That's way above my pay grade. But they don't spend 24/7 with their eyes and ears glued to computers in a basement that smells like old running shoes. Sometimes I feel like my head is going to explode. And not in a good way.

Q: What have you learned from all those hacked communications?

A: There's two categories: drop-dead boring and just-shoot-me-now boring. Do you have any idea how friggin' tedious other people's stuff is? The Spanish!  Always whining about unemployment. The Italians and their ungrateful bambini. The French!  Toujours in le snit.

Q: So no smoking guns?

A: A whole bunch of people talked about wanting to kill their spouses. But that's normal.

Q: What did you learn about Angela Merkel?

A: Don't get me started. Those three-hour gabfests with Christine Lagarde about the Greek debt. The endless bickering with the Social Democrats. The dry cleaning that never came back on time. No excitement at all -- not like the Sarkozys or Dominique Strauss-Kahn. And all her sentences ran backwards.

Q:And now we hear the agency has infiltrated Yahoo and Google worldwide.

A: Tell me about it. That was the last straw. Nearly 200 million records. Who messaged who and who wrote back. And what they said. Worse than a 200-year-long rerun of Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice.

Q: Has all that snooping affected your, er, private life?

A: It's totally over. I go home at night, my wife says, "Agent 5386," (I can't tell her my real name), "you never listen to me." That's what she says. Same every night. Now she's filing for divorce and moving in with her personal trainer.

Q: And you?

A: This is my last week on the job. I'm going into a monastery. Not one of those happy-clappy places where everybody is tweeting the Pope. Somewhere there's total silence. And nothing is wired except the light bulbs.

Q: Do you think Edward Snowden is a traitor?

A: If anyone can roll back this crazy work load he can. Bring it on, I say. In the agency the guy's a hero.

Olivia Ward has covered politics, conflicts and human rights from the former Soviet Union to South Asia, the Middle East and the U.S. Her phone has been tapped in at least two countries.

 

Military action in Syria: the Pinocchio effect

 President Barack Obama left for the G20 Summit after winning backing of key figures in the U.S. Congress for limited U.S. strikes on Syria.  So far American public opinion has not followed his lead. Photo: Reuters/Joshua Roberts.

British Prime Minister David Cameron climbed down from his war horse after losing a House of Commons vote on military intervention in Syria.

Meanwhile public opinion put three-quarters of Brits on the no-go side, according to a BBC poll.

Before France’s President Francois Hollande had a chance to saddle up, polls were running 59 per cent against military action.

And in the U.S., where President Barack Obama won backing from key members of Congress when he called for limited military strikes -- and hopes for a positive vote in the House and Senate -- some 59 per cent of Americans said they won’t answer the call.

 There are a variety of complicated arguments for staying out of a conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people, led to the torture, rape and detention of thousands of others and sent 2 million into exile as refugees.

But the current casus belli – the Assad regime’s apparent use of chemical weapons to paralyse and suffocate hundreds of his “enemies” including children – has been met with more cynicism than sizzling rage.

It’s the Pinocchio effect.

The more Obama protests, the longer his metaphorical nose, in the minds of a public that was force-fed too much WMD truthiness by George W. Bush.

Iraq, Bush insisted, was awash in the stuff. And no American could sleep easily in his/her bed while Saddam Hussein was plotting a sneaky nuclear, chemical or biological attack. Voices to the contrary were quickly silenced and whistleblowers throttled.

Now a broker, more battered America is backing away from WMD claims, even ones far more credible than Bush could muster. Obama’s Red Line means little to those whose lives were flat lined by the economic crash and the massive debts of two recent wars.

But American doubt and cynicism goes back much farther: to the multi-fronted war on communism, to the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s leader Mohammad Mossadegh (which eventually gave us the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic Republic) to Vietnam and Laos, to the American-funded Central American death squads to the Iran-Contra scandal. And so it went.

Now Americans and other Westerners are drawing their own lines in spite of their political leaders. It’s exactly the kind of scenario that Bush’s foes warned of when he was touting the false “evidence” for the Iraq invasion. Whatever the evidence, for better or worse, weary Americans are saying they want the country's nose out of other nations' wars.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East and South Asia. She worked with director Shelley Saywell on the film Generation of Hate, on Iraq on the eve of the American invasion.

 

How the "Taliban diet" helped a French photographer escape his captors

Peter Borghi/Facebook

It was his second week in Afghanistan on his second visit to the country and French photographer Pierre Borghi had just finished having drinks at a bar in Kabul.

With thoughts of watching a zombie movie on his mind, Borghi decided to walk back to his guest house. After all, he figured, the 500 metres would  take him 10 minutes at the most.

But Borghi never made it.

He was stopped on the side of the street by four bearded men who would later identify themselves as Taliban. Borghi was shown a gun to ensure his cooperation, was  stuffed into the trunk of a Toyota Corolla, and was driven through a series of supposed army checkpoints.

It was Nov. 27, 2012. For the next four and a half months, Borghi was a prisoner of the Taliban. He joined an already long and growing list of foreigners who have been kidnapped in Afghanistan.

"They told me that they had no problem with me personally, they had a problem with my country," Borghi says in a riveting first-hand account of his capture on the BBC's Website. "They said they had taken me because I was a Westerner and my country was at war with Afghanistan.

"I was given a piece of paper to write down information about myself, to be passed onto a Taliban "cabinet" for background checking. They needed to check I wasn't a member of the special forces or a spy or a diplomat - all of which would have meant my immediate execution. After the background checks, this piece of paper was to be passed to the French authorities as proof I was alive."

Borhgi says he kept a scrap of graph paper and a pen and began writing notes to himself about what he planned to do with his life if he survived the ordeal. "Sleep, cook, books, hugs, call friends," he wrote. "After this, everyday of your life is bonus!"

After his first 10 days in captivity, Borghi says he was moved to live with an Afghan family, and was guarded by two Taliban fighters.

"It was surreal," he writes. "We ate together, slept together, watched videos on their cellphone together. I even taught them some card games that we played for hours and hours. It's utterly frustrating to play cards with a guy that could put a bullet in your head at any moment, especially when he is cheating."

On March 28, after he was told he would soon be killed because France was not meeting the Taliban's ransom demands, Borghi says he began plotting his escape. About a week later, on Apr. 7, he used some furniture to climb to a window in the barn he was being hidden in.

Borghi writes that as he climbed through the window, "when I reached my hips, I got stuck. I freaked out. But after a few twists I fell in a heap on the outside. I would never have been able to do that without the 11kg I'd lost over the last four months. You might call it the Taliban diet."

After making his way to a Afghan army post following a 10-hour walk, Borghi was taken by military convoy to French authorities in Kabul.

After enjoying his first shower in four months, Borghi, who is now in Europe, called his mother on what he said was "the happiest day of her life."

Rick Westhead is a foreign affairs writer at The Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

 

Home truths: Canadian diplomacy gets to grips

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande at EU summit in Brussels in May. Bertrand Langlois/Getty Images

 Who says Canada isn’t a world leader in international relations?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s rating of Russia as a minus one on the G8 scale was refreshing. After all, since Moscow elbowed its way into the hallowed hallways of developed, and supposedly like-minded G7 nations in 1997, nobody had dared to say the unsayable – that it was maybe a titch premature.

As for Iran, leader-elect Hassan Rowhani hadn’t even warmed up the presidential chair before Foreign Minister John Baird was declaring him a “puppet” and the whole election thing a sham. Turns out the Ayatollah Khamenei is still in charge. And – why pussyfoot -- everyone knows it.

So much for Canada’s bland-and-boring image. A new era of exciting bare-knuckle diplomacy, Ottawa-style, is long overdue, and as fresh as a splash of whatever fills Lake Ontario these days.

Take German President Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande.  A match made in the European Union but definitely not in heaven.

Merkel: Ach!  So there you are, you little socialist salamander, ready to hand out more of the taxpayer’s euros to those lazy, quiche-nibbling slackers and running the economy into the ground so decent hard-working Germans can pick up the tab…

Hollande: Enough with your arrogant Teutonic lectures. Je m’en fous. Take some time off, mon ange. Spend a weekend at a spa in Vichy. There’s a special on fiscal relaxation.

The next meeting between President Barack Obama and Afghan leader Hamid Karzai could be more down to earth and candid too.

Karzai: welcome to our country. Not your country. That place next to Pakistan, which we don’t like very much either. And when you reach the door just leave the cheque on the table.

Obama: so you can hand it out to your relatives?  I don’t think so. We’ve spent at least $1 trillion on this country and we want results.  How much more do we have to put out to get freedom and democracy around here? Cough up or we’re putting the Taliban on the payroll.

Why should the southern hemisphere preserve the niceties of old-fashioned diplomacy?  It’s no secret that South African President Jacob Zuma and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe are not best friends, in spite of old freedom-fighting ties.

Zuma: another year, another election fraud. Didn’t I tell you to get those political reforms in order before you ordered the poll? You may have had a lot of surgery, but let’s face it, you’re 89. How long do you expect to go on here?

Mugabe:  as long as the botox holds out, sweetie. And if I were you I wouldn’t go strutting around telling the neighbors what to do. You’re just another white man in a black man’s skin. And frankly, it doesn’t look so good on you. I can give you a number of someone to  fix that.

All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.
- Zhou Enlai.

Olivia Ward has covered conflict, politics and international diplomacy at the UN, the former Soviet Union, Europe, the Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards.

Why France's Hollande might want to avoid the mailman

French President Francois Hollande  delivers a speech as he inaugurates the Mucem (Museum of Civilisations from Europe and the Mediterranean) in Marseille, southern France on Tuesday.  (GERARD JULIEN/AFP/Getty Images)

Lately, high-placed French officials have sent nasty notes to President Francois Hollande, criticizing how he is handling the flailing French economy.

France is in a double-dip recession. The bread-basket of Europe is being downgraded left and right by ratings agencies and high unemployment remains a constant problem.

Edouard Carmignac, founder of France’s largest independent asset manager, fired off an open letter to Hollande in April, warning “time is running out” for France, according to CNBC.

The economy lacks competitiveness and public spending accounts for 57 per cent of GDP but only 90 per cent is covered by tax receipts, Carmignac wrote, adding that not cutting the public sector is “suicidal.”

The French nanny state is one of the most generous in Europe with exceptional maternity benefits, low-cost child care and an exceedingly large and well paid civil service.

Then there’s the missive from Christian Noyer, the governor of the Banque de France, or, the French Central Bank.

This one is my favourite.

Sent on May 27, Noyer chastised Hollande for high labour costs, flagging competitiveness, a low retirement age and he recommended slashing civil service jobs, according to French author Gaspard Koenig, writing for the U.K.'s Centre for Policy Studies.

As Koenig points out, “for once, a senior figure of the French Republic has raised the alarm on the unsustainable weight of the state in the French economy.”

But here is the kicker -- the French Central Bank employs 13,000 people at a cost of 1.5 billion euros each year, Koenig notes, adding only 6 per cent of the staff is under 30 and 32 per cent are older than 55.

By contrast, the Bank of England employs 1,955 people with a staff cost of 155 million euros. Not that the British economy is a shining example of wealth and efficiency and should be casting stones from a glass house, but, I digress.

So … what exactly are those French central bankers doing and how much are they making to do it?

Apparently, this situation is not their fault. It is French law. Koenig says there is a 1946 statute that practically makes it illegal to fire a member of the French civil service. A special act of parliament is needed.

Ah, France.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Tanya Talaga is the Star's global economics reporter. Follow her on Twitter @tanyatalaga

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Mon Dieu! $3,000 for a bottle as French President auctions off wine cellar

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France's very difficult year. Will it continue?

Mon Dieu! $3,000 for a bottle as French president auctions off wine cellar

Bottles of fine wine put on auction by the French presidential palace are displayed during an auction preview in Issy les Moulineaux, south of Paris.(AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)

It's like a garage sale -- except the garage happens to be in the basement of the French presidential palace.

And the puns are popping faster that the wine corks.

BBC News calls it a "sobering sale" as an auction of more than 1,000 bottles in the exclusive  wine cellar of the Élysée  goes on the block.

The news of the sale  -- part of French President Francois Hollande's belt-tightening measures -- had been reported last month, but now the auction is officially getting underway.

You can a rare peek at the exquisite collection of fine wines in this BBC video.

The BBC report quotes one connoisseur claiming that one reason there was so much good wine available was that the previous French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, preferred water.

But in fact the goal is to replenish the presidential party pantry with less expensive wines without taxing, so to speak, the public purse. 

The Élysée said that “the proceeds from this sale will be reinvested in more modest wines, and the excess will be returned to the state budget.”

According to the New York Times, the Socialist  Hollande was trying to contrast his simpler style as a “normal president” with the “bling bling” image of Sarkozy. 

Still, that had not stopped the last Socialist president, François Mitterrand, from enjoying his favourite Burgundy and a St.-Estèphe, Haut-Marbuzet from the well-stocked cellar. Georges Pompidou, the Times said,  preferred Chasse-Spleen, while Valéry Giscard d’Estaing favored fine Bordeaux from the Médoc.

If you want to add to your wine collection, you can fork out as much as 2,500 euros (about $3,360 Cdn) for a high-end vintage -- but there are some bargain bottles going for as little at 15 euros.

 Julian Sher is a foreign affairs and investigative reporter for the Star. he can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @juliansher 

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Lifting Syrian arms embargo no quick solution to ending war

Will sending weapons and ammunition to armed groups in Syria tip the balance of the civil war in rebels' favour and force President Bashar Assad's regime to the negotiating table? 

That is supposed to be the reason for the lifting of the European Union arms embargo on Syria. EU ministers are today meeting in Brussels to make a decision.

A bit of background: The embargo was put in place in May 2011, shortly after protests began. Among the 22 measures, it prohibits the import and export of arms and equipment, which may be used for internal repression.  The purpose was to put pressure on Assad’s government -- but it also applies to rebels.

However, the war is now in its third year and shows no sign of ending. The 27-member European Union is divided about what to do next. France and Britain want the embargo lifted to help the opposition. 

Here are two thoughtful voices on why the embargo should stay in place:

Middle East journalist and author Patrick Cockburn writes that no one is winning the war despite the rhetoric from some Western politicians and journalists who claim more weapons to rebels would push the regime over the edge. He points out that since March 2011, rebels have only managed to capture one out of 14 provincial capitals. Assad’s strategy is retrenchment and consolidation -- not defeat.

“In recent weeks government forces have opened up the road that leads west from Homs to the Mediterranean coast and the road from Damascus south to the Jordanian border. They have expanded the territory they hold around the capital and trained a militia of sixty thousand, the National Defence Force, to guard positions once held by the Syrian army. This strategy of retrenchment and consolidation isn’t new. About six months ago the army stopped trying to keep control of outlying positions and focused instead on defending the main population centres and the routes linking them. These pre-planned withdrawals took place at the same time as real losses on the battlefield, and were misinterpreted outside Syria as a sign that the regime was imploding.” 

He concludes: “The evidence from Syria itself is that more weapons will simply mean more dead and wounded.”  

The international charity Oxfam today issued a statement warning of "devastating consequences" if the embargo ends. The opposition is fractured, it is impossible to monitor whether transferred weapons would be used to commit violations, and the knock-on humanitarian effect would be a disaster.  

Anna Macdonald, head of arms control said: “International efforts should be focused on halting arms transfers to all sides and finding a political solution to the crisis…Transferring more weapons to Syria can only exacerbate a hellish scenario for civilians.” 

READ MORE: Tragic lessons from Afghanistan on sending arms to Syria 

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at the Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

Lights, camera, action: stars buff up Chechnya's on-screen image

 Elizabeth Hurley attends a news conference in Chechnya's capital Grozny, earlier this week. Hurley will star alongside with French actor Gerard Depardieu in the drama, titled "Turquoise, " that will be directed by French filmmaker Philippe Martinez. (AP Photo/Musa Sadulayev)

“A tale of tragedy, betrayal, lots and lots of mayhem and finally, sweet bloody revenge.”

The modern history of Chechnya? No, a media description of the French-Russian thriller, Turquoise, starring curvaceous British actress Elizabeth Hurley, and lumpy formerly-French actor Gerard Depardieu, now on a permanent tax holiday from Paris in his adopted homeland, Russia.

The film’s biggest casting coup is Chechnya itself.

Russia’s southern banana republic is soon to be a glitzy backdrop to a thriller that aims to eradicate those grittier Hiroshima-like bombing images, massacres, firefights and filtration camps that did so much to undermine its star quality during two brutal wars. Not to mention more recent attention as the place of origin of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers.

 “I followed everything that happened here and saw a city totally rebuilt and very sympathetic people,” Depardieu told reporters from the Chechen capital Grozny, where he is a “very close friend” of warlord leader Ramzan Kadyrov. He is also making a Russian-produced film on Chechnya's post war reconstruction.

Kadyrov’s own hard man image got the soft-lens treatment when Hurley was photographed next to him, cuddling his white kitten, nostalgically named Chanel. And he has taken to posting “almost adorably kooky” pix on Instagram, recently posing benignly alongside another apparent close friend, martial arts film actor Steven Seagal, who gave an impromptu folk dance performance in Grozny.

It won’t be the first time Kadyrov has tried to punch up Chechnya’s image.

He’s imported top-flight footballers for exhibition matchers. And most notoriously, invited action star Jean-Claude Van Damme and Oscar-winning actor Hilary Swank for lavish  national celebrations in Grozny two years ago that coincided with his birthday. (Kadyrov formally opposes public birthdays to avoid accusations of a Stalin-like cult of personality.) After viral, and virulent, media reports, Swank apologized, insisted she knew nothing of her host’s allegedly dubious human rights record, and reportedly fired her manager on return.

This time, Hurley and Depardieu are making no excuses. If they had earlier doubts they could have consulted any number of human rights groups -- like Memorial, whose Chechnya monitor, Natalya Estemirova, was kidnapped and murdered in 2009. Kadyrov’s regime has been accused of pursuing its enemies to foreign countries, killing six of them in Turkey alone. Allegations of human rights abuses fill the files of advocates who can only do their dangerous work outside of Chechnya.

Depardieu, at least, won’t be apologizing any time soon. His new BFF, President Vladimir Putin, personally handed him a Russian passport after he quit France in a dudgeon over a 75 per cent tax on millionaires. He now has registration papers for a new flat in the Soviet-style city of Saransk, capital of the Russian republic of Mordovia, where he plans to open a restaurant.

The region, he rhapsodized, has no oil or gas, but “rich people who make their wishes come true in life.”  Except for Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who was denied parole last month from a Mordovian penal colony where she’s serving a two-year sentence for a brief protest in a Moscow cathedral. None of the punk group has been invited to perform in Grozny.

Olivia Ward covered the former Soviet Union from 1992-2002, including Russia’s two wars with Chechnya. She collaborated on Shelley Saywell’s film A Child’s Century of War, which was based on her reports, and listed for an Academy Award.

France's very difficult year. Will it continue?

After years of sluggish growth and lost competitiveness, the French economy has officially slipped into recession. Youth unemployment is at a staggering 25 per cent.  (Tanya Talaga/Toronto Star)

Don't expect French President François Hollande to be eating cake and sipping champagne as he celebrates his first year in power

Hollande, who beat out Nicholas Sarkozy exactly a year ago to become France's second socialist president, has had a very difficult year.

The French unemployment rate is hovering just north of 10 per cent.  French industry is struggling to compete against Germany and much-needed labour reforms are slow. French actor Gerard Depardieu left the country in a snit over a threatened 75 per cent tax rate on those earning over 1 million euros a year. And then there was the expensive ground offensive in Mali. 

Now, there is news that the 2-trillion euro French economy -- the second largest in the eurozone of nations -- has slipped into a recession after two quarters of negative growth. The gross domestic product contracted 0.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2013.

Hollande got a bit of public grief from European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, who Wednesday demanded France speed up reforms in exchange for another two years of forgiveness to bring the country's budget deficit down. Earlier this year, the French government informed the EU the country could not reduce the budget deficit down to 3 per cent as planned.

Reuters reports that at a joint news conference between the two leaders in Brussels Wednesday, Barroso said France must shrink the "the exorbitant weight of debt" on its economy.

"The two years (grace period), if approved, notably by EU member states, should be used to speed up structural reforms on which future growth depends," Barroso told reporters.

Hollande replied the grace period would be used to push forward reforms already in place.

France’s economic issues may threaten the stability of the euro if it does not turn things around.

Change has not been easy for Hollande to broker. The French unions supported Hollande’s election but it is those same unions that now must agree to change in order to make the economy more competitive. France has also promised to cut 60 billion euros from the budget by 2017.

Tanya Talaga is the Star's global economics reporter. Follow her on Twitter @tanyatalaga