Industry representatives, members of the Hispano-Italian-French Tomato Joint Committee Contact Group, took stock of the 2015-2016 campaign at a meeting they had in Rome on Thursday. The 2015-2016 campaign was marked by a deep price crisis, which has only improved at certain moments. According to Spain's Agricultural Foods Cooperatives, between September 2015 and February 2016 the sector has experienced an 11% drop in revenues and a 17% decrease in prices.
This situation is the result of several downturns. Among them, the high temperatures, which have advanced and intensified production cycles; Spain's and Italy's increased and less staggered production that has expanded the calendar in Central Europe, which has increased its self-sufficiency and imported less. Regarding tomato production there were an additional two factors: the intensification of EU imports from Morocco, and the Russian veto on tomatoes from the European Union and from Turkey, which has caused a saturation of the internal market.
Producers, cooperatives and exporters said the sector was facing serious difficulties because of the losses they have suffered in this and in the previous campaigns. They also said they were losing competitiveness because of the growing difficulties they faced to obtain plant protection products. In this regard, they stated, Member States are not effectively using the tools of mutual recognition or extension of authorization for minor crops.
To face this situation, the participants of the meeting restated the need to adopt the measures they had presented to the Commission earlier this year, which include increasing the amounts of Community withdrawal compensation, so that this instrument can really be effective; the application of the safeguard clause, once the destabilization of the Community market caused by Moroccan imports has been verified, and the method of calculating the value of imports under the EU-Morocco Agreement is changed to establish two import values differentiating round tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, to effectively protect the EU from imports from that country.
The assistants of the meeting agreed with the extension of the exceptional withdrawals enacted because of the Russian veto, announced by the Agriculture Council of March 15, but noted that, to really be effective, these mechanism needed to be improved.
Finally, they asked Community institutions to redouble their efforts to normalize trade relations with Russia (a strategic market that can't be replaced at this moment in time), and to enact measures to rebalance the bargaining power between operators in the market.
