Farmers' protests resonate throughout Spain. The countryside has stood up to denounce the difficult situation it is going through, suffocated by the bureaucracy to access aid from the Common Agricultural Policy and the rise in production costs, which have increased by 41% in the last three years. The crisis caused by the pandemic was followed by the war in Ukraine, which has disrupted the rules of foreign trade in the European Union. Farmers disapprove of cheap imports from third countries, with which they say they cannot compete. The value of foreign purchases of agri-food products grows at twice the rate of sales, a scenario that fuels the demands of an essential sector that cries out for its survival.

The path for a lettuce and a tomato to end up in any lunch salad begins in the soil, with a production process that has become significantly more expensive in recent years.. Since 2020, according to Eurostat data, agricultural production costs have risen on average in Spain by 41.08%, despite the fact that in 2023 the relief of the energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine marked a reduction of 6.75%. % in the price of agricultural inputs with respect to 2022 levels. Energy and fuels for agricultural machinery became cheaper on average by 27.05% last year, although, even so, they are still 54.44% more expensive than in 2020 and 25.95% more than in 2019.

Added to the rise in the price of energy is the increase in the price of other products needed in the field such as seeds, fertilizers or pesticides, for which farmers paid respectively 15.53%, 80.65% and 26% in 2023. .27% more than in 2020, before inflation began to take its toll on pockets. Fuels, energy, fertilizers and raw materials account for approximately 70% of the production costs in the field, to which are added others such as labor costs or land rental.

At the same time, prices at origin – those that farmers and ranchers receive directly for their products – have also grown, reaching an average of 52.35% above 2020 levels in 2023 in Spain, according to Eurostat data.. The increase has been especially pronounced in products such as olives, which have doubled their price at origin in the last three years, while potatoes, cereals, fruits and vegetables have respectively become more expensive by 61.66%, 47. 51%, 39.42% and 38.13% at origin. In the last year alone, the prices received by farmers rose on average by 12.23% compared to 2022. The increases were generalized, with the exception of cereal, which became cheaper by 20.28%.

Differences in prices

Even so, farmers report that the price they charge for their products sometimes does not exceed production costs, so they are forced to sell at a loss.. The Food Chain Law, reformed at the end of 2021, prohibits this practice, which means farmers and ranchers lose money once they have done their work.. “In order to avoid the destruction of value in the food chain, each operator must pay the immediately preceding operator a price equal to or higher than the cost of production of such product,” establishes the rule, which the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has committed to strengthening.

“We have always defended and will continue to defend the Food Chain Law, but since we have such an important instrument that they are copying at the European level, we have to make it work. There are no reasons why in Spain certain products are being paid at a totally ridiculous rate, which is not because they do not reach the production costs, but rather that they do not even reach the harvesting costs and, nevertheless, we have prices on the shelves tremendously abusive for the consumer,” recently lamented Miguel Padilla, general secretary of the Coordinator of Farmers and Livestock Organizations (COAG), after meeting with the Minister of Agriculture, Luis Planas, on the occasion of the protests. The agricultural sector complains of that the law is not always complied with and requires guarantees, such as greater transparency or the creation of price indices below which it cannot be sold.

In this sense, Facua proposes to implement a double labeling model that offers consumers, along with the retail price, information about the price at origin of farm products, thus allowing them to know under what conditions and how much they are paying. the producers. From the moment the farmer grows a food until it reaches the supermarket, it goes through several stages that increase its price.. Once collected, the products are transformed – through a process to wash, pearl or cut them, for example – or they are directly distributed to stores and supermarkets, with the transportation, storage and handling costs that this implies.

According to the data collected in the Food Price Index at Origin and Destination (IPOD) prepared by COAG, during this period the price of some foods becomes 880% more expensive.. This is the case of lemons. According to the latest data from January 2024, farmers sell a kilo of this citrus for 20 cents and in the supermarket the final consumer pays around 1.96 euros, almost ten times more.. Similarly, the price increase from origin to destination is 733% for bananas and 472% for potatoes.. Extra virgin olive oil represents an exception: its increase is only 17%.

More imports

Another of the demands of the agricultural sector is to equalize the conditions under which products are imported from outside the European Union, to prevent the laxity of the existing requirements outside the community club from allowing prices to be set that are too low with which the Spanish countryside cannot. compete. Spain is a country that is a clear exporter of agricultural products.. According to the latest data on the agri-food trade balance published by the Ministry of Economy, in 2022 food worth 67,275 million euros was sold abroad, compared to the 53,851 million that were purchased, which represents a positive balance of 13,424 million.

However, in recent years imports have grown twice as fast as exports.. In 2022, the value of foreign purchases of agri-food products increased by 30.47% compared to the previous year, while the increase was 13.45% in sales. Compared to an increase of 25.57% in exports, the volume of imports in value terms has increased by 51.64% since 2020. More than half of the imports already come from outside the EU, even with trade agreements such as the treaty with Mercosur still pending, which aims to liberalize the entry of agri-food products from Latin America.

“We are defenders of trade, where would we go if not; but of fair trade, in which we all have the same rules, that products that come from outside meet the exhaustive requirements that we have within the EU,” defended the secretary general. of COAG after the meeting with the minister. These more lax conditions allow significantly lower prices, which worries the sector, especially after Brussels eliminated tariffs on imports from Ukraine in 2022 in response to the war, thus triggering the purchase, especially of Ukrainian cereal.. In Spain, imports from kyiv grew by 84.1% in 2022.

Dependency on foreign products increases as the Spanish countryside suffers. According to the Active Population Survey (EPA), the agricultural sector closed 2023 with 770,700 employees. Despite the volume of workers growing by 2.32% compared to the previous year, this is the second lowest figure in nine years – only ahead of that of 2022 -, which shows how the difficulties that the sector is going through are passing It counts the countryside as a means of life, despite its essential nature.

The aging of the population is a significant challenge that Spanish public finances will face in the coming decades. Within less than 30 years, the number of Spaniards of retirement age will increase from 9.7 to 16 million, leading to an increase in spending on public benefits. Researchers from the Foundation for Applied Economics Studies (Fedea) have expressed concerns about the latest pension system reforms, stating that they have led to a significant increase in spending without a corresponding increase in income.

To address this issue, the pension reform introduces new measures to capture income. These measures include a staggered increase in contributions for all workers, capping the maximum contribution bases, and implementing a contribution surcharge for the highest salaries. These measures aim to compensate for the increased spending resulting from the demographic trend and protect the purchasing power of pensioners.

The reform also includes a new incentive system to promote active retirement, allowing individuals to work and collect a pension simultaneously once they reach retirement age. However, researchers at Fedea believe that there is room for improvement in this area and that the measures implemented by the government have not represented a significant change compared to previous legislation.

To address these challenges, Fedea researchers propose a new active retirement model that unifies the three existing modalities, making it fully compatible for individuals to work and collect a pension. The proposal aims to incentivize workers to stay connected to the labor market after reaching the legal retirement age, thereby mitigating the increase in pension spending and reinforcing income. This transition to retirement would be gradual, profession-specific, and flexible, allowing workers to decide if they want to continue working and how they combine their pension with their working hours.

In line with this proposal, Fedea suggests that employees who choose to continue working at retirement age should contribute on the same scale as other Spaniards. Currently, when individuals enter active or delayed retirement, their contributions either stop or are drastically reduced. Fedea’s proposal would recalculate the pensions of those who extend their working life, reinforcing the incentive to receive a higher pension if the years spent working are extended.

One of the challenges facing the implementation of Fedea’s plan is the reluctance of companies to prolong the working life of their employees who have met the requirements for a full pension. To overcome this obstacle, Fedea suggests creating a new type of contract that does not generate severance pay costs. This contract would allow individuals to maintain employment, either full-time or with reduced hours, in the same company or another, without salary limits. The absence of severance pay would be justified by the fact that the employee already has the certainty of receiving their pension if they become unemployed.

The friction between Spain and France due to the unequal liberalization of train transport, which allowed companies from both countries to enter the other's market, has been going on for years at the ministerial level or at the railway companies through continuous calls for attention.. However, now the Government has decided to raise the tone in the face of what it considers to be truly unfair competition on the part of France.. In just one week, the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, has denounced that France is dragging its feet in its obligation to allow Renfe to expand its presence there before the European Commission and has reiterated this to the French ambassador in Madrid in an undiplomatic conversation.. The tip of the iceberg is the delayed arrival of the Spanish high-speed train to Paris, but this train crash also includes the strangulation of the routes that already exist and the slowness with which France is doing its part to connect Spain by high speed with the rest of Europe through the Atlantic and Mediterranean corridors.

According to several sources in the sector, the conflict with France is not new at all, but the difference is the “outrightness” with which Puente has decided to air it and speak directly about “unfair competition” between France and Spain, to the surprise of some. accustomed to the discretion of the past, and the naturalness with which others see it, given the profile of the new minister of the branch, who they say goes very directly to the issues.

Puente already referred to the barriers for Renfe in France when the French socialist Segolénè Royal attacked Spanish tomatoes as “inedible” in the midst of a wave of protest by French farmers who accused Spanish products of introducing cheaper products into their market.. His response was that the real imbalance occurred in the railway sector. Last Thursday, he went one step further in an interview in Espejo Público in which he aired “a rather tough meeting with the French ambassador.”. “We have heard the Government talk about unfair competition in agriculture, Royal talk about our tomatoes, but we are suffering from this unfair competition in railway matters with France,” he added.

What followed from there was a collection of grievances that the Government reproaches France for in the slow expansion of Renfe on French roads as a counterpart to a liberalization of the sector that gave entry into Spain to the high-speed trains of Ouigo, a company owned by the French Renfe, the CNCF, and Iryo, from Treintalia. “They come to Spain and compete with us,” said Puente, who even complained that France “forces” Renfe to bring its trains to Spain for maintenance work, when here no distinction is made between Renfe, Ouigo or Iryo convoys. which, for example, undergo their inspections at bases such as the high-speed one in Vallecas that has just been expanded. “They refuse to give us a workshop,” he denounced.

Delays on the line to Paris

The key to all these complaints is reflected in the impossibility that still exists for the AVE to reach Paris from Madrid, on a line that already enters French territory but ends in Lyon, with a branch in Marseille.. Railway sources claim that “Renfe will end up operating in Paris”, but while there are delays in approving trains and safety equipment and, more generally, in allowing free movement of Spanish trains on French soil.

The origin of the conflict dates back to the process of liberalization of rail transport of people and goods through EU directives that were approved in the early 2000s to replicate on the train what had happened decades before with the plane, with the creation of the Single European Area, which eliminated the monopoly of the flag airlines of the countries that linked two points – for example, a Madrid-Paris only operated by Iberia or Air France – to give entry to other airlines. With them came low-cost, in the same way that low-cost rail services did a few years ago.. The French OUIGO and the Italian Iryo began to compete with Renfe trains in exchange for the freedom that Renfe would have to enter the French market.

“Spain scrupulously complies with the European directive,” assures the managing director of the Spanish Railways Foundation, Adrián Fernández Carrasco.. “It was the first where three different operators have entered high-speed lines and it involves the legal guarantee that has been given to Ouigo and Iryo,” adds Fernández Carrasco, who emphasizes that this allows for “greater use” of the network. and that “more people can travel by train.”

Other countries have not been as diligent, such as Germany or France, which represents a greater problem for Spanish trains because it is a border country.. At the moment, the AVE reaches Lyon and “rare” difficulties and delays are detected in obtaining technical approvals for its trains, as well as in having operating shifts and in expanding beyond, thus frustrating the objective of reaching Paris, where The Italian Iryo does arrive from Milan.

Not only the Spanish Government says it, but also the French regulator of the railway sector itself.. In a report on 2022 published last year, it stated that “the entry of high-speed passenger transport services is a path strewn with technical difficulties”, with “entry brakes” that, among others, it recognizes that Renfe and identified among them what the sector in Spain recognizes as the great difficulty, related to the technical approval of trains, such as the maintenance aspect, for which the regulator recognizes that there are no spaces in France to take convoys from companies from other countries. and, no less important, the distribution of the network's capacities, that is, the shifts in which each line will be able to operate, which, in addition to being scarce, have always been communicated to Renfe with little notice and which, according to what the sector points out, could be at the origin of these latest public messages from Puente a Francia.

The railway sector assures that liberalization was “exemplary” in Epsñaa, which “strictly” applied the European directives. Thus, in 2005 Renfe, which until now had been responsible for the service and infrastructure, was divided into Renfe Operadora – for operations – and Adif, manager of railway infrastructure in which any company has a place, regardless of the country. , as long as it complies with the CNMC rules and pays the fees with which it contributes to paying the high cost of infrastructure. As a consequence, passengers have seen how ticket prices have dropped significantly, particularly on lines that were previously as expensive as Madrid-Barcelona, in a competition that also included Renfe's low-cost Avlo.

In France, Renfe began operating in 2013, first in collaboration with its historical company, CNCF, and alone from 2023 through a system different from the Spanish one, which instead of creating a new company to manage the infrastructures, these remain under the control of CNCF through a holding model. The Spanish Government detects a conflict of interest for the party responsible for infrastructure to allow other companies to compete with CNCF itself.

“We have a lot of problems to advance in cross-border communications with France by rail and road, it is a tremendously protectionist attitude. We demand a minimum of reciprocity and that the rules of market liberalization in the EU be ensured,” the Minister of Transport demanded this week.

Petition in Brussels for “France to comply”

Puente's complaint has not only been on television or in an apparently undiplomatic meeting with the French ambassador.. At the end of January and in the midst of agricultural protests in France that were blocking the transport of goods, also in Spanish trucks, the minister met in Brussels with the Transport Commissioner, Adina Vălean, to whom, among other issues, he conveyed “the need for France complies with its obligation to build the sections in its territory that make up the Trans-European Transport Network, which should allow, for example, a train from Portugal to reach Poland.

This is another case in which Paris is also “dragging its feet” due to the delays it foresees in its contribution to the European network, on which it depends that Spanish trains can continue on their way throughout Europe.

The victims of this strangulation have well-known names, the Mediterranean Corridor and the Atlantic Corridor.. The Spanish Government is making an “unprecedented” investment effort to have them ready on the planned dates, 2025-2026, while the dates that France is considering to complete works in its territory that, for example, should unify the European gauge, They extend until 2030-2035.

“There is a bottleneck in France,” they lament in the sector. With the deadlines with which Paris works, for example, a train will be able to run between Barcelona and Perpignan at high speed -200-250 km/h- but then it will have to go down to 140 km/h until it reaches another high-speed track in Montpellier. .