The figures were advanced by Vítor Rodrigues who accompanied a delegation of associated organisations from Trás-os-Montes in a meeting with the regional director of the North of Agriculture and Fisheries, in Mirandela.

The meeting served to expose the concerns of farmers in the region, which, as he told Lusa, are also transversal at a national level, namely the general increase in prices.

The leader assured that, “despite some slight increases in prices paid to the producer in several sectors, they have long been eaten up by the brutal increases in the costs of production factors”.

“There is an order of magnitude of the margin that remains in distribution, and then in retail, which is huge, so what the consumer pays, sometimes, is a matter of ten percent or less that reaches the hands of farmers”, he concluded.

To change this situation, the CNA “has a concrete proposal that is being implemented next door in Spain, which is the creation of legislation that prohibits sales at a loss along all links in the chain”.

Other measures that the confederation has been advocating is that public bodies make purchases from local supplies and the encouragement of short sales circuits, “as a way of circumventing the dictatorship of large-scale distribution”.