Eastern Europe’s food supply chain is shaped by foreign supermarket chains like Lidl, Tesco, Spar and Auchan, which have entrenched themselves as key players in the retail landscape.
While the note does not single out specific actors, the foreign retailers’ strong bargaining power has sparked long-running tensions with governments, which accuse them of driving down prices and squeezing traditional shops out of business.
The Commission’s December proposal sought to address complaints from farmers by empowering national authorities to investigate cross-border abuses and mandating contracts to ensure pricing transparency.
Big buyers, bigger problems
But Takáč and his allies insist that deeper structural changes are needed to tackle the dominance of powerful buyers and secure fairer conditions for weaker players in the food supply chain.
“First and foremost, there is a need to increase the protection of … farmers, but also processors and food producers,” the note reads, adding that “it is also important to increase the protection of the final consumer against the abuse of the position by dominant entities.”
Governments across Eastern Europe have introduced measures in the past to curb supermarkets’ influence — such as taxes, price caps and requirements to stock local produce — but these have often clashed with EU single market rules.