Petition demands better deal for Swiss farmers 

Five delegations of farmers submitted a petition on Monday to the Federal Council and the four retailers Migros, Coop, Lidl and Aldi. The text containing their demands was signed by 65,000 people in less than 15 days. The signatures given in Bern to Federal Councilor Guy Parmelin were accompanied by a stack of 4,000 pages of legal texts representing the all-out regulation in the agricultural sector, said the Swiss Farmers’ Union and Agora, the Association of French-speaking agricultural groups. Like their European counterparts, Swiss farms suffer from a permanent increase in constraints and administrative burden, while compensation remains the same at most. At the same time as the text was delivered to Bern, four other delegations were at the management of Migros in Zurich, Coop in Basel, Aldi in Schwarzenbach and Lidl in Weinfelden. In the retail trade, the emphasis was on the low prices paid to production which do not cover the increase in production costs. The farmer delegations ...