Following today’s presentation by the European Commission on the proposal for a directive on unfair trading practices in business-to-business relationship in the food supply chain, S&D rapporteur Paolo de Castro, and S&D co-ordinator Eric Andrieu stated the following:

 

 

"After having lived for more than 10 years in a legislative labyrinth made of 20 different national legislations, finally the Commissioner, Phil Hogan, has today come up with a comprehensive and overall positive proposal which aims to create a common European legislation against unfair practices in business-to-business relationship in the food supply chain.

 

"The draft directive is a crucial first step forward in preventing the no longer acceptable behaviours which still today create inefficiencies and food waste, to the detriment of our producers and consumers.

 

"The S&D Group will fight to build on what we achieved through the Omnibus regulation, up-scaling the transparency throughout the whole of the food chain and the competitiveness of the weaker actors.

 

"We must get rid of unfair practices such as late payments or last-minute orders’ cancellations for perishable products. The cloudy days of the ‘magic’ price multiplications from field to fork are about to come to an end."

 

 

Until now, there have been no rules governing relations between the various players in the agri-food chain, leaving the weakest vulnerable and farmers facing problems because of market concentration and the pressure on prices exerted by big distributors in particular. It is clear that unfair trade practices have extremely damaging consequences for the whole food supply chain, starting with small producers.

 

"This directive must allow us to eliminate these unacceptable practices to better protect our farmers.

 

"But we must go further and respond to the problems posed by the concentration of distribution at the European level.  We must protect consumers and farmers against oligopolies and respond to the question of integrity in the global food system."