I often ask myself when we’ll all wake up. By “we”, I mean not only the food industry, but anyone out there over the age of 35. The fact is that fresh fruit and vegetable consumption among young people is not going to increase in any significant way unless the adult generations become more mindful and discriminating about the quality, variety and freshness of the food they’re eating - and pass that knowledge on to their children. Legislation reforms and marketing campaigns without education, high quality and fair competition are band-aid solutions. It is not only a war against obesity that we’re waging. It is also a war against ignorance, apathy and the increasing manipulation of the retail supply chain by a small number of increasingly powerful and profit-taking players.

One can ask if the European Commission (EC) has an understanding of, or is looking far enough ahead, in its proposed reform of the fruit and vegetable Common Market Organisation, and what this will truly mean to all sectors of the food industry and consumers in the medium- to long-term future. During our discussions on this issue at the recent WUWM conference in Turin, representatives of wholesale market authorities in 16 European member states had a fairly good idea of some of the future consequences... and no one was jumping for joy.

In a nutshell, the proposal puts an end to the community withdrawal contribution (CWC), except for free distribution (by the way, many wholesale markets around Europe are key supporters of free distribution). It considers shifting from production support to providing direct aid to producers by introducing a system of decoupled income. It recognises the role of producer organisations (POs) as being the only recipients of community financial support, providing them with more support and flexibility. The reform integrates, without additional allowance, measures for crisis management in operational programmes established and managed by POs, and it plans to increase the rate of the community contribution for promotional and marketing campaign actions targeting young consumers from 50 to 60 per cent.

And yes, wholesale market authorities and their traders have their concerns. A lack of precaution in decoupling community aids for fruit and vegetables could steer us towards a destabilisation of the entire fruit and vegetable production and marketing chain. And the exclusive concentration of EU aid to POs can hardly be considered acceptable, especially without a parallel body of balance and better inter-professional relationships. In our mind, to avoid an oligopolistic organisation and to be more attractive to producers, POs need to be open to all marketing strategies.

As the WUWM declaration resulting from the Turin conference noted: “The future of the fruit and vegetable chain cannot only be built on an exclusive dialogue between POs and supermarket buying centres.” Furthermore, the EC proposal to drop aspects of existing trading norms in favour of commercial branding is regrettable to say the least. For anyone hoping commercial brands will one day substitute official standards and signage, let me say to you here: at least in the wholesale world, we’re now wide awake.