The president of COAG-Canary Islands, Rafael Hernández, participates today in Brussels in a high-level group convened by the European Commission to evaluate the functioning of the food chain in Europe and analyze issues such as abusive commercial practices, codes of good commercial practices and regulatory regulation on competition matters.

For Canarian producers it represents a boost in the defense of their interests in the European Union, since only two representatives of community farmers will be present in this working group (Rafael Hernández and the general secretary of COPA, Pekka Pesonen), in addition to various representatives of the main multinationals located in the EU and four general directorates of the Commission.

For COAG-Canary Islands, the lack of transparency of agri-food markets on the islands, coupled with the imbalance in the distribution of income between different parts of the food chain, where the farmer in the Canary Islands receives only 30 percent of the price that the consumer pays on the sales shelves, It is necessary to promote measures that bring to light abuses against producers and limit abuses against the weakest link in the chain., farmers and ranchers.

Taking into account this circumstance, The Confederation has indicated that it is “very good news” that the European Commission has created a high-level group to evaluate the functioning of the food chain, recognizing that practices such as selling at a loss are being carried out, returns of unjustified items and non-compliance with the conditions agreed with the producers, that have led the primary sector of a place like the Archipelago to barely occupy the 1 percent of the region's GDP.

As Rafael Hernández points out “have direct dialogue with the European Commission and the main multinationals in the food sector, at the highest level, It will allow us to put solutions on the table so that producers are not always the most affected in the food chain and denounce commercial practices that are based on an abuse of power at the expense of the agricultural sector and the consumers themselves.”.