Petition demands better deal for Swiss farmers
Five delegations of farmers submitted a petition on Monday to the Federal Council and the four retailers Migros, Coop, Lidl and Aldi.
The text containing their demands was signed by 65,000 people in less than 15 days.
The signatures given in Bern to Federal Councilor Guy Parmelin were accompanied by a stack of 4,000 pages of legal texts representing the all-out regulation in the agricultural sector, said the Swiss Farmers’ Union and Agora, the Association of French-speaking agricultural groups.
Like their European counterparts, Swiss farms suffer from a permanent increase in constraints and administrative burden, while compensation remains the same at most. At the same time as the text was delivered to Bern, four other delegations were at the management of Migros in Zurich, Coop in Basel, Aldi in Schwarzenbach and Lidl in Weinfelden.
In the retail trade, the emphasis was on the low prices paid to production which do not cover the increase in production costs. The farmer delegations thus underlined the need to increase producer prices this year by at least 5 to 10% during negotiations in the branches with trade and processors.
Among the five demands mentioned in the petition, there is notably an increase in producer prices and the reversal of price formation on the basis of actual costs.
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here. Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.