In Malaga there are 1,600 hectares of tomato cultivation, the majority in Axarquía, producing 65,000 tons per year. But the national coordinator for fruits and vegetables and responsible at Asaja Malaga, Benjamin Faulí, pointed that this numbers could be reduced drastically in the next coming years, assuring that “we should be prepared for the extinction of such emblematic cultivation in the province” if the present situation keeps on and there’s no cancelling of the agreement with Morocco as it happened for fishing.
The main reason is that Morocco exported to the EU more than 61,000 tons of tomato between October and November, when the limit for this cultivation in the agreement was only of 38,000 tons for this two months.
This numbers, classified by the Asaja responsible as scandalous are above the set amounts for the future agreement, established in 46,000 tons for the first three months of the running year. “The European Commission and the Spanish Government are looking the other way for years regarding this commercial action without any justification and with a shameful impunity”, he criticized.
The excess of offer in the products coming from Morocco has a direct consequence in the market prices and farmers assure that these prices are “unsustainable”. The proof is in that the tomato kilo was sold at 0,75Euro at origin last year and this year will be closing at 0,52 Euro.
The reality is that the amount of tomato getting in since Morocco is not the only reason to explain the price drop. Prices were also affected a lot by the crisis in the sector coming with the E.coli burst in Germany and affected every product coming from Spain. Faulí pointed that this two circumstances made the price for the kilo of tomato in Malaga to be under 0,30Euro last Summer against the average 0,70 Euro in the begin of the year.
Source: Malagahoy.es
