If 2011 was marked as the year of the cottage protest, then 2014 is increasingly shaping up to be the year of the pepper protest.
While in previous protests we were accustomed to having two sides - the consumer and the production and marketing chain - the pepper protest came and changed the rules of the game: consumers joined farmers and together they are leading a protest against the marketing and retail chains, which are speculating on tariffs and pocketing huge capital, with differences of hundreds of percent. While the consumer pays a lot of money and the farmer receives a meager return - the large marketing chains that dominate the market make the profit.
A number of entrepreneurs took up the gauntlet and did the obvious: they established a direct supply line between farmers and consumers, andFacebook account They advertise sales they organize all over the country. This way, the masses buy directly and cheaply from the farmer - who makes more money than in wholesale sales, the goods are of high quality and sell out quickly - and everyone benefits.
There is no doubt that this situation will not be able to last long, and farmers claim that if the market trend does not change, the pepper growing industry may collapse.
The issue was brought up for a special discussion this week in the Knesset's Public Inquiries Committee, which summoned a long list of those involved - from the growing industry to the Israeli Consumer Council. However, the retail chains - with the exception of Rami Levy, who came in person - did not even bother to send a representative to the discussion.
Committee chairwoman MK Adi Kol opened the discussion: "This is indeed a protest that began with dealing with peppers, but unfortunately peppers are not alone and this is a much broader phenomenon."
Throughout the discussion, the farmers present raised claims about the unfair brokerage gaps that sometimes lead them to sell produce at a loss, with the chains sweeping up a brokerage gap that in many cases reaches 300% more than the wholesale price. "It's a matter of time before farmers have to go and sign at the employment office," they claimed.
MK Kol added: "I contacted the public on Facebook and asked them to send me the prices of fruits and vegetables in their place of residence and I received a huge price range, but in all of them there are huge brokerage gaps between the prices that I see that the farmers receive. I want to understand where the gap is? Something stinks here. Even though we invited the representatives of the marketing chains, they chose, and not for the first time, not to come, with the exception of Rami Levy. The chains' repeated evasion raises the question of whether they have something to hide."
Rami Levy, CEO of Shekma Marketing: "I speak for myself and not for all the chains. There are claims here that are trying to discredit our name. Show me one invoice that you sold peppers for one shekel, as you claim. In the current quarter, we barely maintained an 18 percent gross profit, and if we deduct operating costs, the profit is only one percent. We sell the peppers for 8.90 shekels and I can show you invoices that we paid eight shekels for the goods."
MK Zevulun Kalfa: "The backlash that farmers receive from the public proves like a thousand witnesses that we have touched a real and painful point for growers on the one hand and consumers on the other. It is time to restore sanity to the fruit and vegetable markets and end the pigheadedness of the intermediaries - the marketing companies and wholesalers. The existing reality is unbearable, a layer has been created among the intermediaries that takes advantage of the lack of information that exists among growers and the lack of choice of consumers, which cuts a handsome slice in the middle."
Davidi Hyman, CEO of the Farmers' Association, added: "Intermediation gaps are a death blow to fruit and vegetable growers in Israel - when the price is expensive, the consumer buys less or does not buy at all, and the farmer is left without pay and with a crop to destroy. The food supply chain consists of an equilateral triangle: farmers-wholesalers-retailers, everyone needs to make a living. As soon as one partner loses, the food supply chain will fall apart, and in the current situation, it's only a matter of time."
Attorney Ehud Peleg, CEO of the Israeli Consumer Council: "There is a mystery here: what happens to the pepper on its way from the farmer to the shelf? The farmer earns pennies from the matter and the consumer pays a fortune, so I come to the conclusion that the problem is in the middle. If there is no self-restraint, external restraint must come and the brokerage gaps must be monitored. The government must determine what the range of brokerage is allowed in each industry. It can be changed during the year. Consumers will be the inspectors and that is how we can overcome the problem."
Uri Tzuk Bar, Deputy Director of Research and Strategy at the Ministry of Agriculture: "There is no supervision of prices except for the supervision of milk and eggs. It is not possible to supervise things where supply and demand change with high frequency and the curves change on a daily basis. What is needed is to expand the information and provide more information to the public.
"We try to give the most information to all parties through information that we collect and through a private company that collects information. There are excellent applications through which you can find out in real time what the prices are in the area, and we publish data on the Ministry of Agriculture website. Consumers need to know how to use information more, information is the power of the consumer."
MK Zevulun Kalfa commented: "The old woman from Dimona who wants to buy peppers doesn't know how to use apps or search the tables on the Ministry of Agriculture website."
MK Uri Maklev: "With the encouragement of the Public Inquiries Committee, we wanted to enact a law that would require retailers to publish the price at which the goods were purchased, meaning that someone selling peppers for 11 shekels would be required to publish how much they bought them for."
Uri Tzur Bar replied: "The proposal wanted it to be advertised in the store, and it was explained that there were many restrictions on this price. The wholesale price, for example, ranges between six qualities, which quality will we advertise? The price to the consumer that we take from the company is an average of all the chains and it is eight shekels. We advertise them every week."
Committee Chairwoman MK Adi Kol summed up the discussion and said: "I intend to promote a bill in coordination with the Israeli Consumer Council and the Farmers' Association in Israel to supervise the brokerage prices of agricultural produce, which would prevent a situation in which farmers make a few shekels profit while the consumer pays an exorbitant price. I also intend to help publish the table of price gaps on my Facebook page and on the committee's website for public inquiries, in order to bring the data to the attention of all consumers."
It should be noted that two points require a solution in agricultural produce in Israel:
A. The brokerage gaps and the cartel that exists in the field, as noted in detail. B. The expectation of costs and the required production quantity versus compensation. In the dairy sector, and in Europe even in the agricultural sector, the farmer knows at the beginning of the year what approximate quantity he is supposed to supply, and what the rate he is expected to receive for it is, and he prepares accordingly. In Israel, on the other hand, the farmer does not know how much produce he is supposed to supply. A fact that puts the agricultural sector in Israel at risk of collapse.
Later, KHB Kol published on its Facebook account a table of fruit and vegetable prices that it had compiled with the help of consumers on Facebook:
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