At midday today, farmers and ranchers have carried out a protest in the Plaza del Mercado de Logroño to denounce the "very complicated situation" that the countryside is going through, marked by production costs "through the roof" and by selling prices "that do not cover" those same costs.
The rally, driven by the farming organizations ARAG-ASAJA, UAGR-COAG and UPA La Rioja, has had the aim of making visible "the economic effort involved in filling up a tractor’s tank and what farmers receive for the products that every day make their way into consumers’ shopping basket".
The president of ARAG-ASAJA, Eduardo Pérez, has explained that "what we want is to make clear the very complicated situation that farmers and ranchers have, not only people from La Rioja, but Spanish people as well, and also at a European level".
As he has detailed, "every day we see how our production costs are through the roof, whether it is the issue of fuel, fertilizers, labor, plant protection products, etc. in order to carry out our work day by day".
At the same time, he has lamented that "on the contrary, the price we receive for our products is increasingly still at prices that do not reach cover the production costs. That is, right now in agriculture and livestock farming there is no decent profitability to continue working in this sector".
With this symbolic action, the farming organizations have wanted "for everything that our day-to-day costs us and the fact of continuing to work" to be reflected, because, as Pérez has emphasized, "we do not want to keep living on either handouts, or aid, or subsidies; we want to keep working with dignity from our sector".
He has insisted that it is a productive sphere that "is the main socioeconomic engine of the rural environment and, specifically, of La Rioja", and he has called for "what we want is to tell every kind of political class that it should listen once and for all to the primary sector, which is agonizing, which is disappearing, and we cannot allow that, continually legislating against the sector".
After highlighting "today the amount of people who are gathered here, and the support we have from society", the head of ARAG-ASAJA has wanted "to make very clear to society that without farmers and ranchers, you also have to see what people will be able to eat in the future".
On this line, he has denounced that "we are producing a series of foods with very high quality standards and we are seeing how products are coming from third countries with questionable quality when it comes to producing these foods", citing as an example "those famous strawberries from Morocco that were irrigated with sewage waters and then we saw the health problems that they led to in certain areas of Europe".
Therefore, he has demanded that "so what we ask for is that, once and for all, the political class listens to us and, once and for all, the political class legislates in favor of such an important sector as the primary sector", the person in charge of ARAGF-ASAJA has concluded.
The coordinator of UPA La Rioja, Héctor Sáez, has recalled that "the fundamental slogan of this event is 'We produce your food, we deserve to live from our work', because what cannot be is that the consumer increasingly pays more for the products they have to buy in the grocery basket and the farmer, in contrast, increasingly receives less for producing them".
He has demanded that "the law on the food chain has to be complied with; that law right now is a law that is being ineffective because the farmer, in many cases, as may be the grape, as may be the potato, as may be the cereal, that is producing below its production costs".
In his remarks, he has specified that "potatoes can multiply their price by 9 from the time the farmer produces them until the consumer can actually access them in the grocery basket", while "the case of the grape is well known; they are paying the farmer below what it costs him to produce one kilo of grapes".
Regarding cereal, he has explained that "right now the example we have put forward is that filling the diesel tank of a large tractor only serves for a workday, and in that workday the farmer can only do is prepare the land to sow the seed that will then produce the cereal".
He has emphasized that "with all this, what we want to say is that we do not want to live on privileges; we want to live on our products, on what we produce. We do not want subsidies; we want the product to be paid for as it has to be paid for above costs so that the farmer has profitability. And most importantly, without farmers there is no food, without farmers there are no towns", he has concluded.
On the part of UAGR-COAG, Roberto Salinas has pointed out that "due to the war between Iran and the United States, diesel and fertilizers are going up," while "the measures the Government has are patches; we want continuous measures over time and professional agricultural diesel, which is capped so that these things do not happen."
He has also demanded "that the law of the food chain be complied with because we are the weak link; we are always the ones who pay for all these issues."
With this public action, the organizations have wanted to convey to citizens, in a clear and visual way, the economic reality of the countryside: the high costs that agricultural professionals must assume in order to keep their operations running.
To illustrate this, different usual products from the grocery basket have been displayed, in order to highlight the gap between what it costs to produce them, what farmers and ranchers receive, and the final price that consumers pay.
The food used in the protest was subsequently delivered to the Banco de Alimentos de La Rioja and to the Cocina Económica.
This mobilization is part of the calendar of protests convened by the three organizations, which began with the tractor rally on October 28 in Madrid. Finally, that call was suspended in solidarity with the victims of the railway accident that occurred in Urda, Toledo.