Friday, March 29

Yolanda Díaz begins meetings with supermarket companies to limit the price of food

Vice President Yolanda Díaz already has the first meeting with a distribution company after her call for an agreement to limit the prices of food and basic products. Before the broader meeting called for Monday, with employers and consumer groups, tomorrow, Thursday, Díaz will meet with Carrefour, which has requested a meeting with the second vice president. The company has also announced today that it will launch a basket of 30 basic products at 30 euros.

“As we have asked them, yes”, Yolanda Díaz responded with satisfaction regarding the Carrefour initiative. The second vice president announced in an interview with elDiario.es that she would try to reach an agreement with food distributors and consumer organizations to guarantee shopping baskets of “20 or 30” basic products at a reduced price to alleviate the effect of inflation, It particularly affects the most vulnerable households.

Carrefour has been ahead of its competitors and has already joined this initiative. Yolanda Díaz has highlighted that Carrefour participated in the French agreement that the vice president has set as an example and precedent so that Spain can now implement a similar agreement. Díaz has reiterated that her proposal does not go through legislating or imposing maximum prices by law, but rather an agreement with the companies so that they apply these discounts.

In any case, from the second vice-presidency they insist that it is also important what type of products are reduced, so that they offer a healthy and balanced diet.

Yolanda Díaz has stated that she is willing to meet with more companies, but that Carrefour has been the first to request a meeting. The company announced this Wednesday that its reduced basket, available from September 12, responds to the current economic situation, which “is causing Spanish families to see their purchasing power limited and drastically modify their consumption habits.”

The meeting for next Monday morning, scheduled together with the Ministry of Consumer Affairs led by Alberto Garzón, will be attended by the employers’ associations ANGED (Association of Supermarket Distributors), ACES (Association of Spanish Supermarket Chains) and ASEDAS- (Spanish Association of Distributors, Self-service and Supermarkets).

On the other hand, numerous consumer organizations will also attend: CCU-Council of Consumers and Users, the Association of Users of Banks, Savings Banks and Insurance (ADICAE), the Association of Communication Users (AUC), the Confederation of Consumers and Users (CECU), Consumers in Action (FACUA), the Federation of Independent Consumer Users (FUCI), the Spanish Confederation of Consumers and Users Cooperatives (HISPACOOP), the Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU) and the National Federation of Consumers and Housewives of Spain (UNAE), explain in the Ministry of Labor.

The announcement of the meetings of the second vice-president took place after statements this morning by the Minister of Finance and Public Administration, María Jesús Montero, who has downgraded the initiative, although she has assured that a greater effort will be requested “from those who benefit extraordinarily from this crisis.”

“In no case is it a setting of maximum prices or a regulation of those prices,” said the Minister of Finance in an interview on Telecinco’s ‘El Programa del Verano’, collected by Europa Press. “As far as I have heard, there has been no proposal regarding the regulation or intervention of the maximum prices of these products,” said the head of the Treasury.

In his opinion, what the second vice president spoke about was that the Government is “permanently working hard” in the dialogue with the large distributors to try not to spread all the intermediate prices to the final price that the consumer buys. .

Consider the producers

Vice President Yolanda Díaz explained that this Wednesday the self-employed groups ATA, UATAE and UPTA have requested that the possible agreement to limit the price of food take producers into account, so that they do not end up being harmed by the measure. In the same sense, the agrarian association UPA pronounced itself yesterday.

Díaz has picked up the gauntlet from the self-employed and has assured that producers will be taken into account so that they are not the victims of price limits, which in no case would be unilateral, he pointed out.

The vice president has promised to evaluate mechanisms so that the distribution companies do not pass on the price reduction to farmers and other producers, who in many cases already denounce unfair situations in the pricing systems.

The president of the CEOE: “This is starting to look like Soviet programming”

The president of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, has rejected the proposal of the second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, to cap the price of basic foods.

“We cannot share price intervention. This is starting to look more like Soviet programming. Now we are going to see if there are 20, 30 or 50 products on the market that I am going to intervene”, Garamendi indicated in statements to RTVE collected by Europa Press.

For the employers’ association leader, if the aim is to regulate “absolutely everything”, what one ends up with is “an intervened economy, an intervened State and a lack of freedom”.



www.eldiario.es