Protests threatened on borders

Latvia's sugar-beet grower's organization said it would widen its strike, planned for Feb. 25, to all farming sectors in order to shake up the government so that it would make specific decisions regarding sugar, dairy and pork market stabilization.

Sugar-beet grower's organization chief Modris Villa said that sugar beet growers, dairy farmers and pig breeders would block roads at Grenctale and Eleja checkpoints on the border with Lithuania, as well as the crossing at Berzkrogs on the Pskov highway, an important transit artery, until the government finds an acceptable solution.

"We will not stand by the roads weeping but will just block them," said Villa.

He noted that should the government on Feb. 18 make a decision on sugar market stabilization sugar beet growers will not take part in the action, while farmers from other agricultural sectors will have to decide whether to go ahead with their protests.

The council for cooperation between farmer organizations in a letter to the prime minister as well as Finance, Economy and Agriculture ministries in January demanded the government provide information regarding decisions in the sugar and other sectors over the course of two weeks, warning that otherwise they would stage protests.

The council also demanded information about measures that have been carried out, a schedule of planned measures aimed at improvement of the domestic market, government regulations setting out procedures for carrying out domestic market protection measures and an answer to the question about how the government plans to ensure the existence of Latvia's agriculture sectors up until accession to the European Union.

The sugar industry in Latvia has been suffering as local sweets makers are forced to use Latvian-made sugar - expensive compared with world sugar prices - which lowers competitiveness of their products. Thus they try to bypass this rule and buy cheaper foreign sugar, which in turn hurts Latvia's sugar factories and beet growers.

The dairy industry suffers from what is seen as Lithuania's milk price dumping in Latvia, while pig breeders complain of excessive inflow of cheap imported pork.

The government so far has made no decisions concerning these three agricultural sectors.