The Unpicking Food Prices report from Sustain finds that, after intermediaries and retailers take their cut, farmers are sometimes left with less 1% of the profit from the food items they produce.
The report also finds that more value reaches farmers in shorter, local supply chains and makes recommendations for Government to improve farmers’ incomes incuding:
- Tougher regulation is needed to help redress the imbalance of power between farmers, processors and the supermarkets including maintaining the Groceries Code Adjudicator, introducing new, legally binding, sectoral supply chain codes of practice, better labelling to ensure transparency and planning rules to curb local retail dominance.
- Building new better routes to market for farmers – so they have more power and gain greater value from their produce – through an action plan to increase the market share of shorter and farmer-focused supply chains, public investment in localised agri-food infrastructure (such as sorting, drying, hubs) and enterprise and using dynamic public procurement models to source from a large range of farmers and growers.
- More transparency in supply chains, greater mandatory reporting and acknowledge the huge overheads in the current, complex system
The full report can be found on the Sustain website.