AVA-ASAJA: “the ruinous watermelon campaign shows the failure of the CAP to stabilize markets”

The ruinous watermelon campaign in the Autonomous Community of Valencia, with destroyed or abandoned product, shows that the measures of the CAP aimed at stabilizing the markets and guaranteeing a decent income are a terrible failure, as reported by AVA-ASAJA. To say of the agrarian organization, all this finishes “the worse hortofrutícola campaign Valenciana recent”.

For AVA-ASAJA, watermelon is the final chapter of a disastrous season from start to finish for the interests of producers. The prices offered at origin have experienced a gradual sinking over the weeks to stand at only five cents per kilo. With this level of contributions the farmer can not even cover the costs involved in picking and transporting to the warehouse, so the final stretch of the campaign is characterized by the proliferation of uncared for melonares, the fruit left to lose or directly destroyed by the farmers’ own tractors.

Carpeted holdings of rotten fruits and vegetables on the ground, tractors destroying crops, ripped trees … This is the desolate panorama that portrays the worst horticultural campaign of the last decades in the Valencian countryside

“First it was the onion and the potato, things did not improve with the bone fruits (from peaches to plums, through Paraguayans or apricots) and now it has been the turn of the watermelon. We do not find enough adjectives to describe this horticultural campaign that has caused an economic tragedy in hundreds of Valencian families. But the worst thing is despair, because we are not seeing in the political class the commitment and effectiveness necessary to respond to the real problems of the farmer, “says the president of AVA-ASAJA, Cristóbal Aguado.

The main reason for the ridiculously high prices paid to the farmer is the saturation of European markets, encouraged both by the entry of massive foreign imports and by the Russian veto

The large food distribution once again used this pretext to ruthlessly exercise downward pressure on quotations. In addition, climatic conditions did not help either in central and northern Europe, where the persistence of the cold delayed the demand and raised the stocks, nor in Spain, since other regions of more precocious production like Andalusia and Murcia deprived space to the productions Valencian.

Aguado claims that “the measures adopted by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which envisage European, national and autonomous legislation, are a terrible failure to stabilize fruit and vegetable markets and, ultimately, profitability to producers”.

President of AVA-ASAJA: “with the current lack of transparency and connivance with the abuse of the large distribution, legislators are putting us at the feet of horses”

As Aguado insists, “administrations can not wait longer to allocate funds for the modernization of the sector and to take effective measures such as the establishment of income insurance or a food chain law at the community level to correct this class of imbalances, because the alternative is the non-incorporation of young people into the sector and the abandonment of the fields”.

Prices offered to Valencian farmers in 2017 (euros / kilo):

Cultivo	Umbral de rentabilidad	Precio medio	Precio mínimo
Cebolla	0,20	0,12	0,04
Patata	0,25	0,20	0,07
Melocotón	0,55	0,30	0,15
Paraguayo	0,50	0,45	0,20
Albaricoque	0,45	0,25	0,15
Ciruela	0,50	0,30	0,18
Sandía	0,18	0,10	0,05

Source: Asociación Valenciana de Agricultores (AVA-ASAJA)

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