BRATISLAVA, February 23, (WEBNOVINY) – Opposition SMER-SD would reduce VAT rate from 20 to 19 percent and increase direct payments to farmers in order to cut high prices of foodstuffs in Slovakia. As the party’s chairman Robert Fico said after their shadow cabinet meeting this Wednesday, re-introduction of 6 percent VAT on products sold from farms, tax relief for the so-called red diesel used at farms and repeat endorsement of the scrapped law regulating the relations between retail chains and their suppliers are essential for reducing foodstuff prices. “Slovakia has to return to the idea of food safety,” emphasized Fico.
Fico is convinced that the recent Cabinet has no interest in Slovak agriculture. “We think Iveta Radicova’s Cabinet contributes in a great extent to everything that is going on with foodstuffs, because having no agricultural policy. They consider agriculture to be a useless sector and this has been shown in some concrete decisions which they adopted against the farmers. They don’t count with agriculture, they don’t want it and now they are beginning to harvest, the Prime Minister and her ministers, crops in the form of high foodstuff prices,” added the former Prime Minister.
Prime Minister Iveta Radicova, Minister of Agriculture Zsolt Simon and Minister of Economy Juraj Miskov have agreed on measures to help mitigate the impacts of foodstuffs price increase on the citizens. They agreed on handing out flour and pasta to low-income families. Simon’s ministry would also like to support Slovak brands and to change the legislation by removing all barriers exceeding the EU frameworks. Radicova also admitted the possibility of curbing the VAT on foodstuffs once, but added that this did not help in other countries.
The growth of consumer prices accelerated in early 2011 with foodstuffs and non-alcoholic beverages prices increasing in January by 6.1 percent year-on-year. According to the ING Bank analyst Eduard Hagara, both global and domestic factors, such as VAT increase and price regulation, influenced the price rise.
SITA