Although the purchase price of wheat is significantly cheaper this year, the price of flour and bakery products is not lower. While the millers are silent, the bakers justify themselves with labor costs. Farmers say, the worst is the one who produces something.
The purchase price of wheat in the mills this year ranged from 30 to 35 pfennigs, i.e. what is the average price of a bread roll in a bakery.
Due to the poor quality of the crop, many farmers did not even manage to reach the 30 pfennigs per kilogram of wheat that the millers give.
“One kifla (small bread) is a kilogram of wheat. For 60 marks you get 100 kg of flour. Today somewhere they say around 400 and some bread is made from 100 kg of flour,” says farmer Petar Dragojlović.
In addition, they are still waiting for the payment of the promised incentives at the local and entity level.
“The state gave 500 BAM per hectare, that’s fine, it promised 5 pfennigs, it’s not there. The municipality promised 10 pfennigs, it’s not there. When you give it several times, it doesn’t have any of that,” says Dragojlović.
Bakers say that they cannot influence the price of wheat in any way, and that they too are in an unenviable situation, because due to high labor costs, they cannot lower the prices of buns, bread and other baked goods.
“We all silently bypass the millers who are the ones who purchase the wheat, they process the flour and calculate the costs and their profit in that, we take the flour from the millers at the price they set. In the absence of labor, the largest percentage refers to labor,” says Radenko Pelemiš, president of the Association of Bakers of the Bijeljina region.
BHRT was unable to get an answer from the miller to the question of how the purchase price of one kilogram of wheat was reduced to the price of a bun. They did not want to be in front of the cameras, and the few who answered the phone said that they were not informed about it. In the end, in the Bermuda triangle without the blame of the baker – the miller – the farmer, the consumers lose the most.
Due to the poor yield of wheat, estimates are that the domestic market will depend on imported wheat, and this ultimately means a further increase in the price of bread and bakery products for end consumers, but also farmers giving up new production, BHRT reports.
