While last year’s domestic crop of bread grain has been waiting in silos for a year and waiting for a buyer, wheat is imported into Bosnia and Herzegovina from Croatia, Serbia, Hungary and Ukraine. All the absurdity of the agrarian policy and the import lobby is breaking over the backs of the primary producers, whose farms are slowly shutting down due to unprofitable production, but also of the final consumers – who are faced with new price increases every day.
Despite the promises that all the domestic crop of bread grain will be bought – the farmers are in a hopeless situation before the beginning of the big spring sowing. Large quantities of bread grain from last year are still in barns waiting for a buyer. At the same time, during the past year, many goods were imported, and the prices of bakery products rose several times.
“Last year they told the buyers – buy it, we will regulate it. However, now all the hangars are full in the Semberija area, and we are approaching a new harvest, new wheat. In these conditions, we have nothing to sell to. The people in the villages I visited – they don’t even have the conditions to leave, and all the warehouses are full of last year’s wheat,” says agricultural producer Goran Spasojević.
Economic conditions are not favorable to farmers. And not even temporal. Sowing in certain areas is greatly delayed due to weather conditions, but also lack of money. Propagation material for spring sowing is unaffordable for many because its prices, according to farmers, are enormously high.
“We haven’t had such heavy sowing in a long time. Seed material has never been more expensive, one bag with which to sow about half a hectare costs about 160 marks”, warns Savo Bakajlić, president of the Association of Agricultural Producers of Semberija and Majevica.
It is planned that about 28,000 hectares will be sown under corn this year in the area of Semberija. However, the farmers claim that they will not sow all the originally planned areas because they started to sell off the livestock a long time ago. Meat production has been drastically reduced, and milk production is also declining due to uncontrolled imports.
“That milk was tried to be sold in Serbia for 15 dinars and it didn’t work – that part was picked up and brought to us and flooded our market. And now we have to throw away ours of good quality, and they import theirs, which is not healthy and not even for human use, and they bring down our prices and shut down even the few producers that are left,” claims agricultural producer Radenko Arsenović.
Bakajlić states that people have sold off livestock and now we have reached a price that is enormously high – the citizens have fallen under the import lobby where they dictate the price and everything else.
And while the countries of the region work intensively to protect domestic production, but also implement measures that affect the drop in prices, in BiH the authorities turn their heads from this problem. Short-term measures are being adopted which, according to analysts, serve to blind the eyes of the citizens.
“In the long term, such a situation is unsustainable because we can only fill our budgets at the level of economic growth, exports – and we don’t have that, and that’s why those Government decisions were generated last year because of the election year and this year because of the promises made before the elections”, emphasizes economic analyst Milenko Stanić.
And in the pre-election period, we listened to everything – from the abolition of excise taxes on fuel, to a package of measures to reduce the consequences of inflation. To date, none of the promises have been realized, and citizens have been buying only the most basic things for a long time.
The disparity between income and the cost of living is increasing. Social justice does not exist. And while 25% more is allocated for politicians’ salaries than last year, 15% of the population lives in absolute poverty.
