The High Level Forum on a better functioning food supply chain has welcomed a proposed set of principles to ensure fairer business relations along the food supply chain.

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This core group  included organisations along the entire food supply chain including farmers, industry processors, brand manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, large and smaller businesses. The principles agreed through this process represent a common understanding of fairness in business-to-business relations amongst all the parties.

A consensus-driven approach has allowed the multistakeholder group to identify fair and unfair practices and, starting from those, to formulate a set of principles which aims to be applicable to all contractual relations without undermining competition in business relations. The members of the multistakeholder group have met regularly and discussed widely in order to overcome disagreements and diverging views on contractual relations. The list presented today shows that eliminating unfair practices are a common need of the whole food supply chain and that all stakeholders are willing to find effective solutions.

The support shown today by the High Level Forum is an important step which all stakeholders in the food supply chain welcome, although a formal endorsement would have been more useful to the process. But it must be continued with a thorough reflection on how best to implement and enforce these principles and make sure that they are applied in daily business relations. The group recognises that the latter is the most important phase in the process; hence it is keen to continue working together, in line with the good work done so far, and in the same spirit of cooperation. Today’s green light will make it possible to step up this work towards a framework for implementation and enforcement of the principles as a contribution to Commission work in identifying appropriate policy options as stated in Commission Communication COM(2009) 591: “A better functioning Food Supply Chain in Europe”. Contact persons

Members of the group are: AIM (European Brands Association), CEJA (European Council of Young Farmers), CELCAA (European Liaison Committee for the Agricultural and Agri-Food Trade), CLITRAVI (Liaison Center for the Meat Processing Industry in the European Union), Copa Cogeca (European Farmers European Agri-Cooperatives), ERRT (European Retail Round Table), EuroCommerce, EuroCoop, FoodDrinkEurope, UEAPME (European Association of Craft, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises), UGAL (Union of Groups of Independent Retailers of Europe). AIM