It’s just amazing: Everybody smiled at Mrs Künast’s idea of holding a “Teuro-Summit”, [Teuro = a term combining the words “teuer” (expensive) and Euro], but now, just a few weeks later, the consequences are so dramatic that Minister Künast must countersteer sharply. She complains about the rock-bottom prices offered at the supermarkets and makes demands for fair prices for the farmers.

Dear Mrs Künast, there are no such fair prices! And who, by the way, should fix them!? This had long enough been tried in socialism.

There are just market prices!

Should the grocery trade succeed in bringing prices down below production costs, production will, as a consequence, be reduced. This will, in turn, result in price increases again. In pig production, this business has been called “pig cycle” for more than one hundred years now.

Whether or not production that might accordingly have been reduced in Germany would be resumed looks very doubtful, to me at least, in the face of the present situation in agricultural policy.


*) Internationale Grüne Woche: EU’s main international agricultural trade fair, taking place at Berlin