Farmers from all over Andalucia held protest in Sevilla

FARMERS from all over Andalucia held a protest in Sevilla. “I work from six in the morning to 12 at night 365 days a week so that others can earn money,” laments Antonio González, from the Camino del Castillo cattle farm in Fuentes de Andalucia.

Antonio is one of the hundreds of farmers who this morning have travelled from different parts of the region to the central government headquarters in Andalucia, located in the Plaza de España in Sevilla, as reported by Andalucia Informacion. The problem is that the increasingly low prices at which they are forced to sell the milk they produce is causing the closure of many farms, most of them being family farms. The reason is that they have been selling below the cost of production for years and subsidising thanks to some external aid, savings or income.

“The 475 Andalusian families that still live on dairy cattle are in a delicate position. We are with the milk around our necks,” indicated the agrarian associations that convened the demonstration (COAG, Cooperativas Agro-Alimentarias, OPL del Sur, UPA and Asaja).
During the reading of the manifesto, signed by all the organizations present at the protest, the president of Agro-alimentary Cooperatives, Juan Rafael Leal, explained that in “recent years we have witnessed the closure of numerous farms in our community, more than 30% in the last decade”.

The accounts are as follows, six years ago, the producers sold the litre at €0.35, with which the farms were barely maintained. However, at present, prices at origin are between €0.31 and €0.33 euro cents.”They do not even cover production costs, which are around €0.35, as recently stipulated by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries. Although we know that in some of our farms they reach up to €0.40,” the protesters indicated