Ministry of Agriculture wants to increase demand for Polish food

On September 30, changes to the ordinance from three years ago will come into force, requiring that meat sold by weight should also have visible flag of a given country in addition to the written name of the country of origin. This is to allow the consumer to recognize at a glance where the product comes from and choose the one from Poland if it is an important factor for him. The recipe applies to pig, poultry, goat and sheep meat. This is the second product that is subject to flagging after potatoes.

“Consumers are increasingly looking for meat that they can be sure of. The European Union does not allow certain products to be labeled with the country of origin, although this is changing and more and more ministers from different countries are also talking about this subject,” Jan Krzysztof Ardanowski, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development explained.

He stressed that he doesn’t want to decide for consumers, but let them make an informed purchase decision.

For the time being, potatoes are required to be flagged with the country of origin. Meat producers (and more retailers) were given 90 days to adapt the label to the new requirements. 

On average, a consumer in Poland eats around 40 kg of pork, around 30 kg of poultry and 2-3 kg of beef annually. When the lockdown occurred, exporters were in trouble: half of Polish poultry and 90 percent of beef (which the regulation does not apply to) are produced for foreign markets. Pork producers, on the other hand, complained about the decline in livestock and meat prices due to overproduction in the US and the closure of the HoReCa segment, which has not yet returned to the scale of operations from the same periods of previous years. However, Poles began to declare purchases of local products more willingly: according to Nielsen, every fourth believes that they buy more of them than before the pandemic.

(Newseria)