Leader calls on farmers to resume delivering milk

A leader of the protesting dairy farmers, Antun Laslo, said on Thursday afternoon that the disgruntled farmers had jettisoned, for the time being, their plan to block border crossings and he also called on farmers to restart delivering milk to producers.

The latest decision regarding the protest actions by dairy farmers was made after Laslo and other farmer leaders had held a meeting with Parliament Speaker Josip Leko and Deputy Speaker Dragica Zgrebec.

They scheduled a meeting for Friday between the disgruntled farmers and the parliamentary agriculture committee and the agenda being the situation in the cattle-breeding and dairy farming.

After today's talks, Laslo said that it was urgent that problems in this sector were solved and criticised the way Agriculture Minister Tihomir Jakovina was going about this.

Farmers stopped delivering milk to manufacturers on Monday, demanding the purchase price be raised from HRK 2.09 to 4.05 per litre.

In the meantime, the minister called on dairy farmers to resume delivering milk and stressed that it was not the ministry that defined the milk price but that this was a matter of the market.

Jakovina said that Croatian farmers must start producing more, better and cheaper agricultural produce in order to remove the need for the import of such goods.

He explained that approximately 1.4 kuna from the state budget went to dairy farmers for each litre of milk through various forms of subsidies, as an addition to the existing price for milk. (Hina)