German Agriculture Minister Rejects Parity Price

The renewed call for cost-covering parity prices for agricultural products, which has been prominent on the list of demands put forward by protesting farmers in the past two weeks in Germany, has been flatly rejected by the Agricultural Minister Julia Klöckner, in a “fact sheet” which just repeats the EU Commission’s narrative on the alleged benefits of the open world markets. The free market would regulate prices much better than state interventions, the paper claims, adding that protecting domestic agricultural products would not benefit the private consumer who would benefit from “higher diversity of offered products” not necessarily produced in Germany.