A large group of farmers from the areas of Berat, Fier joined these days to obtain floor prices in negotiations with collectors and exporters.
The agricultural season has begun to yield the first greenhouse crops. Cucumbers are now being harvested, but the price of the pickers reached less than half the cost at only 20 lek per kilo last week.
Exposed to market prices, without financial support from the government, farmers tried to band together last week to set a floor price for new produce. For two days, the producers agreed not to sell, blocking the export as well. In this way, they managed to sell at the beginning of this week at over 60 Lek per kilogram, almost double compared to the previous week.
"There is a distortion of the market and the price, always to the detriment of the producer. In addition to the exporters, there are several intermediary aggregators. These manage to divide the farmers by giving low prices since the production does not wait, it must be harvested immediately. Farmers under pressure to sell as soon as possible, otherwise the loss deepens, accept prices that do not even cover the costs," said Mariglen Ziu, a farmer with a long experience of growing in greenhouses in the Samatica area in Berat.
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