Faced with an ever deepening recession, some local groups have begun coming up with novel ways to beat the financial crunch. in a bid to cut out the middleman farmers across Greece are now offering their goods to consumers whose family budgets have been slashed by the financial crisis. The initiative began with potatoes in Pieria, but it has now spread all over the country. Now farmers are offering olive oil, honey, meat, legumes and other goods. Consumers make their orders online and then the producers schedule a date to sell their goods to them via a voucher. A simple system, but somehow it works. The result: Hundreds of people are now purchasing directly from the producers at reduced prices. For instance, the cost of a kilo of potatoes in Greece runs at about 60-70 cents, and from what has been reported producers were selling these goods to a middleman at a mere 20-25 cents a kilo. That means that the middleman was making a massive amount of profit and was at the same time controlling the price on the market. Interestingly, when producers refused to sell their goods at the suggested price, then the middleman would ignore their products -leaving them to rot- and rather imported cheaper goods from third world nations.Things are changing. Farmers and consumers are now in direct contact with each other and have finally bypassed traditional allocation structures, increasing the profit for farmers and lowering the prices for consumers.
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March 20, 2012
Greek Farmers And Consumers Ignore Middleman And Do Business (VIDEO)
Faced with an ever deepening recession, some local groups have begun coming up with novel ways to beat the financial crunch. in a bid to cut out the middleman farmers across Greece are now offering their goods to consumers whose family budgets have been slashed by the financial crisis. The initiative began with potatoes in Pieria, but it has now spread all over the country. Now farmers are offering olive oil, honey, meat, legumes and other goods. Consumers make their orders online and then the producers schedule a date to sell their goods to them via a voucher. A simple system, but somehow it works. The result: Hundreds of people are now purchasing directly from the producers at reduced prices. For instance, the cost of a kilo of potatoes in Greece runs at about 60-70 cents, and from what has been reported producers were selling these goods to a middleman at a mere 20-25 cents a kilo. That means that the middleman was making a massive amount of profit and was at the same time controlling the price on the market. Interestingly, when producers refused to sell their goods at the suggested price, then the middleman would ignore their products -leaving them to rot- and rather imported cheaper goods from third world nations.Things are changing. Farmers and consumers are now in direct contact with each other and have finally bypassed traditional allocation structures, increasing the profit for farmers and lowering the prices for consumers.