Yolanda Díaz and Alberto Garzón's plan for supermarkets to offer healthy shopping baskets at reduced prices is running into a resounding refusal from distribution. A month after meeting face to face and with food shot up, the distribution moves away from a private pact with the Government to try to alleviate the pockets of consumers when it comes to filling their refrigerators and pantries.
The second vice president and the Minister of Consumption intend to reconvene a new meeting with all the employers in the coming days to put pressure on them. The Government, and at this point it is important to point out that Pedro Sánchez supports the initiative, will try again to reach an agreement so that Mercadona, Alcampo, Lidl, Dia and other big brands agree to reduce products such as meat, fish, dairy products or pasta because "they have room to do it."
But the disposition of the big distributors is not positive in this sense. Only Carrefour maintains a commercial proposal with 30 discounted products, but not all of them are healthy and essential. For this reason, the answer they offer is that it is the Government that can and should make a decision that is within their reach: reduce the VAT on basic food to the super-reduced rate of 4% or directly eliminate the tax because "there is margin fiscal". With this, families would be helped, sources from the national association of large distribution companies (Anged) point out. The PP seconded the proposal.
In full tug-of-war between the Government and consumers, food prices continue to climb month after month. There is no truce. The National Institute of Statistics (INE) figures in two digits the increase in price of a good part of the shopping basket in the last year. Fruit has risen 12.3%; poultry meat, 18.1%; dairy, 17.3%; legumes and vegetables, 17.9%; fish, 10.6%. And so on. The OCU concludes that inflation has an annual extra cost for families of 830 euros.
Supermarkets are not oblivious to this reality, but they consider that they are already making "an effort to contain prices". They quantify the increase in costs over the last year at 12.8%.
Distributors are not alone in this situation. The president of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, supports them and has already spoken on more than one occasion about the controversy with Yolanda Díaz using terms such as "Soviet planning" or "cartel". From the employers, they remember that the CNMC has already warned that capping food prices is prohibited.
There is controversy. Because Yolanda Díaz herself spoke at the beginning of September of a possibility that was contemplated in the legislation. The Ministry of Labor has studied it. This is article 13 of the Retail Trade Regulation Law, where it can be read that "the Government, after hearing the affected sectors, may set the prices or marketing margins of certain products" in the case of first class food. need.
But that decision is not currently on the table. The intention is to reach that private agreement with the distributors. A decision like the one made by a small grocery chain in Valencia, with whose owners the second vice president spoke by phone to thank them for their decision to offer a shopping basket with 28 products at 29 euros.
