The issue of balancing power between farmers and the businesses they sell to has been on the agenda for years. But the crises in European farming over the past two years — particularly in the dairy sector — have seen many thousands of farms fail and injected new urgency into calls to shore up those on the brink of collapse.
The task force makes a host of recommendations — ranging from deeper futures’ markets for agricultural products and more explicit leeway for farm co-operatives to control pricing — but it is the recommendations on how farmers interact with big supermarkets such as Carrefour, and processors such as Lactalis, that are set to dominate the political agenda. [...]
Retailers’ responses to the farmers’ arguments are failing to resonate. Brussels supermarket lobbies have acknowledged that unfair trading practices exist but they have uniformly opposed European legislation. They point to existing national legislation in 20 EU countries and vastly differing national markets as reasons against common European rules.
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