"Croatia's food production has dropped below 40 percent of sufficiency. Already now in the present crisis there are various bulk buyers and middlemen cropping up, all to the detriment of farmers," Antun Vrakic, owner of the Agro-Palm company and member of the presidency of the Croatian Chamber of Agriculture, told the newspaper.
Vrakic warned that the Croatian agricultural policy was run by interest groups and that it was going in the wrong direction.
"Grants are being taken for farmland on which nothing is grown. Inspectors from Brussels have found that only two percent of grants made available for organic farming are justified. And now they want back the money that has been paid out over the last three years, a billion kuna per year. A proposal has been made that we should all show solidarity and participate in the repayment together, which is out of the question," Vrakic said.
He said that at the start of the coronavirus crisis the Chamber of Agriculture asked the Ministry of Agriculture to make an inventory of the goods in the warehouses to see which production should be increased, but there has been no response.
"We used to have war profiteers and now we will have corona profiteers," Vrakic said.