“We perceive that prices continue to be determined by the strongest link, and from here, downwards”. This is the message that the farmers communicated yesterday to the Ministry of Agriculture at the meeting of the Observatory of the Food Chain, an appointment prior to the meeting that Minister Luis Planas will hold today with the representatives of the professional organizations Asaja, COAG and UPA and in which they expect concrete measures. The camp, which has already protested in front of the distribution centers of some companies, claims that it wants to know the prices and costs of its productions.
Coinciding with the ninth day of protests on motorways, secondary roads and streets in different parts of Spain, the farmers presented to the minister and the entire food chain the demands they will make this Thursday at the meeting with Minister Planas. Regarding the prices at origin, the farmers find it necessary to agree on a “cost and price index” that will make them reverse the operation of the sector. They asked that “prices be set from the bottom up, and not the other way around”, so as not to have to sell at a loss. With these words, they pointed to the distribution and to the intermediaries.
Planas was aware at the meeting of the “one-off” problems that continue to exist in the food chain and that harm the “weakest link”, which is how he defined farmers and ranchers. Specifically, the Minister of Agriculture spoke of “very diverse commercial situations” that involve non-compliance with the regulations. To try to solve this, he encouraged the agricultural organizations to insist to their associates that they “formalize complaints of their associates to the competent authorities”, that is to say, to the Food Information and Control Agency (AICA).
The minister also committed to the representatives of the entire food chain to strengthen ex officio controls. Specifically, as the president of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, advanced a few days ago, Planas announced that his department is already working to increase inspections to strengthen “compliance” with the Food Chain law. He did not advance whether the AICA will hire more technicians, but he did point out that this reinforcement will focus on analyzing “the commercial relations of companies with their suppliers”. However, the Ministry of Agriculture rules out increasing the penalties on distribution and intermediary companies for serious or very serious breaches of the regulations.
The representatives of the farmers demanded from the ministry that the AICA increase ex officio inspections in the matter of costs and prices after impacting on their claim to be able to have profits when producing. In the firm sanctions of the inspection agenda, there is none for selling at a loss, as reported by the Facua consumer association.
In order to try to reach a consensus in the calculation of production costs and in the setting of prices, the Ministry of Agriculture presented to the participants in the Observatory of the Food Chain the “study of costs and income of agricultural holdings ( Create 2.0). It is an interactive tool for consulting technical and economic information on productive activities. The problem is that it is updated at the end of 2021 and therefore the data it contains is not recent.
The Spanish government and farmers agreed at the meeting of the food chain that, after more than two years in force, the specific law to avoid selling at a loss works, but it must be strengthened. The minister pointed out that, from January 2022 to December 2023, prices at origin rose very significantly, but he also assumed that a “microeconomic reading” needs to be done in which difficulties in the application of the regulations in force.
