British farmers and the supermarket price wars

British farmers forced to pay the cost of the supermarket price wars

The Guardian, Saturday 2nd July 2011.

As profits soar at the supermarkets, food producers say they are being forced out of business by unfair buying practices.

You can pick up a punnet of British raspberries – at their best this weekend – on a two-for-one offer in most supermarkets. But as shoppers reach for that quintessential summer treat, they should perhaps ponder the fact that it is the farmer, not the supermarket, who is paying for the generous discount.

The farmer may well be making no profit at all, with no choice in the pricing and little or no idea, when he picked and shipped the raspberries, how much he would get for them. Or that the packaging would be paid for by the farm, but done by a company chosen by the supermarket – at up to twice the cost of it being packaged independently.

Read the full article at The Guardian.