Hundreds protest in front of the house of Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter/courtesy of Bar Hefetz
Today (Thursday) at 15:00 the ministerial committee on the issue of the cost of living is expected to meet for the first time since the war.
This is the first time the committee has met since September, after the current meeting was also postponed four times.
At the meeting, the ministers are expected to discuss Economy Minister Nir Barkat's reform - "What is good for Europe is good for Israel".
The meaning of the reform is the adoption of the European standard for imported products, including in the field of food and spices, that is, the opening of the market to broad competition while relying on the European standard and without the need to separately approve each new product that an importer wishes to sell in Israel, if it is already approved for sale in Europe.
However, Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter demands that the committee leave out of the discussion all agricultural products and their derivatives - meat, fish, milk and its products, eggs and more.
If Dichter's demand is met, then a long line of significant food products with critical nutritional value will remain outside the reform and their prices will not be reduced.
According to Dichter's appeal to the committee and to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, no staff work was done regarding the agricultural produce and therefore it should not be included in any move that would include import relief.
"I would ask you to exclude agricultural produce from the upcoming discussion in the ministerial committee on the cost of living, until an
orderly staff work is held to examine the move in cooperation with the professionals in my office. There was no professional dialogue with my office at all, and the main points of the moves were brought to our attention yesterday in an unreasoned and unqualified manner," Dichter writes.
Barkat and Dichter.
The second demands that agricultural products be excluded from the reform of the first/Ruben Castro
According to Dichter, "If the European standard is established as a binding standard in Israel, the local farmers should also be allowed to line up accordingly and allow 'fair play', while renouncing Israeli knowledge and reducing the role of the veterinary services, as a regulator in this area, and all this while examining the impact of the moves presented in the proposal of the Ministry of Economy about the cost of living and their effect on the market's behavior
. By encouraging imports using the method of 'what is good for Europe, is good for Israel' while completely ignoring important professional considerations regulated by the ministry and supervised by it in public health aspects.
"I will ask you to exclude agricultural products from the upcoming discussion in the ministerial committee on the cost of living, until an organized staff work is held to examine the move with the cooperation of the professionals in my office," he clarifies.
More on the same topic:
Avi Dichter
agriculture
will come
reform
Nir Barkat
meat
fish
eggs
milk