ACM starts research pricing in food chain

At the request of the Minister of Agriculture, the Consumer & Market Authority (ACM) will start monitoring price formation in the food chain. There are many links in the road that our food travels from farm to fork. The monitor will soon show for each link what price companies paid for the purchase of a product and what the selling price is. The monitor will also describe the differences in price structure between a number of regular products and their sustainable variants. In the first instance, six products are involved: onions, white carbon/acid, tomatoes, pears, milk and pork. This is a cross-section of agricultural products produced and consumed in the Netherlands. In addition to price formation, the monitor also looks at developments in the agricultural markets.

Wageningen Economic Research will collect the data for the ACM. The ACM publishes the results every year. The monitor is carried out for at least two years. The first report will be published halfway through 2020. Market parties are approached to participate in the study.

What information does the food chain monitor collect?

The monitor looks at both the purchase price and the selling price in each link of the food chain. In concrete terms, this involves questions such as: How much does an onion packer pay for a kilo of onions from the farmer? Is there a difference with sustainably grown onions? How much does he charge for packing and how much does he sell the packaged onions, for example, to a middleman? In this way, it becomes clear how the euro spent by consumers on food is distributed among the various links.

Why a monitor?

Many farmers and market gardeners feel that they have little influence on the price they can charge for their products. Some producers indicate that the requirements in the field of animal welfare and sustainability are being increased without there being adequate returns in return. Minister Schouten of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality wants to strengthen the position of the farmer in the food chain and ensure that farmers and horticulturalists have nothing to prevent them from becoming more sustainable. The ACM monitor will provide insight into the prices in the various links in the food chain and the differences between regular products and the sustainable variants, so that the public debate can be conducted on the basis of facts. Mechanisms behind price formation will also be examined, so that the differences between companies, product variants and seasons, for example, can be better explained.