Europe’s major grocery retail chains are paying prices for tomatoes, lettuce, citrus and other fresh produce at such a low rate that Spanish growers are consistently not receiving enough money to cover their production costs.
This was the claim from Andrés Góngora from Spain’s Coordinator of Agricultural Organisations (Coag), who said prices being paid to growers were now at “ruinous” levels, exacerbating the “pricing crisis” that the sector had endured since the 2008/09 season.
Quoting data from the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Góngora claimed that all of Spain’s principal fresh produce exports – including citrus, apples, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, cucumbers and courgettes – had been sold “at a loss” during the last trimester of 2011.
However, far from being an isolated occurrence, the Coag official said that certain products, notably tomatoes, had been sold at prices far below those of previous seasons during the whole year.
The organisation accused European supermarkets of being primarily responsible for the “ruinous situation”, claiming they had “used excuses” like the E coli crisis, the economic recession and a “supposed lack of demand due to market saturation” to impose below cost prices.
“The retailers are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs,” said Góngora. “They don’t care about bringing the sector to complete ruin, while they maintain margins to their benefit.”
