The government is being urged to “study” a proposed French law that, if passed, would force buyers of agri-food produce to incorporate costs of production in price negotiations with farmers.
The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) said today (Thursday, March 18) that there was “undoubtedly a momentum building behind the objective of legally ensuring that farmers and primary producers receive a fair price from the corporate retailers who completely dominate the EU’s food sector”.
Pat McCormack, the association’s president, noted that this movement was especially strong in France. where “policymaking seemed notably less beholden to the wishes of these corporations”.
There does seem to be a slow-but-steady momentum building up behind the idea of margin reform by regulation and without that reform the contradiction between a continuing ‘cheap food’ strategy and the lower volumes involved in the transition to low emission farming will render those environmental moves futile.
“We have repeatedly pointed out that any meaningful action to lower emissions will have to involve the end of the ‘cheap food’ policy operated by the corporate retailers for the last 30-odd years,” McCormack said.
He claimed: “It is that policy that prioritises volumes over margin and leaves farmers having to produce more as the corporate retailers relentlessly drive down prices paid by the consumers while keeping their own retail margin.
“Everyone behind them in the supply-chain simply passes the reductions back to the farmers who have borne the cost of this very deliberate strategy for decades now,” the ICMSA president added.
“We have had a situation for the last 30 years where the consumers paid an artificially low price with the balance of the real cost paid by the farmer-primary producer. That system was brutally unfair and hundreds of thousands of EU farmers have seen their livelihoods sacrificed on the altar of this ‘cheap food’ policy.”
McCormack stressed: “The integration of farming with climate change measures has meant that time has run out for this wasteful and destructive system”.
“We will have to reform the way we calculate the costs of getting food to the consumers and that will mean that the costs incurred producing that food are incorporated in the price paid to the farmers by the retailers,” he argued.