The role of producers´ organisations in rebalancing the food chain: yesterday, today and tomorrow?

Abstract

Enlace de la comunicación dirigida por los autores al " ICA 2016 Almeria International Reseach Conference. New Strategies for co-operatives: Understanding and managing co-operative creation, transition and transformation". ; The first questions address in the paper are historical: why the European Union has developed the le gal concept of "producers´ organisations" instead of taking advantage of the existing cooperative legal framework and how they have developed in particular in the precursor case of the fruit and vegetables. This background is needed in order to understand properly the second part, on the current situation, and the third on the possible evolutions in the coming years. Secondly, the paper presents and discuses some of the important changes in the European regulation, introduced by the new CAP 2014-2020, concerning the possibilities of joint selling, joint negotiating and farmers cooperation. Special attention is devoted to the legal changes introduced in the primary regulation and to the recent Guidelines approved by the Commission at the end of December 2015. It concludes that the current situation is deeply unsatisfactory. It is the result of deep and long discussions inside the Commission first. Later, the negotiation field moves to the informal trilogies between the Commission, the Council and the Member States and the European Parliament. It continues with some considerations on the future debate which, in our opinion without any doubt, will take place sooner or later and concludes with some proposals to clarify and to improve the current rules. Both consumers and producers are suffering from excessive market volatility. The paper presents a possible win-win strategy which contribute to rebalance the food chain and to safeguard consumers´ interests. They are also compatible with the current European financial rules and disciplines. Current primary regulation will have to be change. The main obstacle are nor technical nor legal. As often, changes have first to start in the mind of the main economic and political actors. ; Peer reviewed