Planas assures that consumers are “on the eve” of a price drop in the basket

The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Luis Planas, assures that it is “on the eve” of households noticing a drop in prices in the basket, if there is no volatility factor going in the opposite direction, after the stop in January of “very strong price growth”.

In this sense, as he explained in the headline Agriculture at the informative breakfast, “no one has a crystal ball or a magic wand” to know the exact date. For his part, he stated that the trend is “cost reduction” and that this will be transferred “sooner rather than later” prices that reach families, because he understands the latent “concern” that exists in every household in Spain about the average expenditure on food, which is between 20% and 21% in families with lower incomes.

Likewise, he subscribed to the data on the CPI, which reached 6.1% in the month of February, which the National Institute of Statistics (INE) published this Tuesday. In this regard, he indicated that despite the fact that the CPI for February is not yet known, he assured that He has “great confidence in INE”.

In this sense, the head of agriculture revealed the words of economists who believe that inflation is passing “a kind of plateau”, as well as that “the Government will take the measures it deems necessary” to continue mitigating the impact of rising prices.

It does not declare a VAT reduction

“I’m not going to decide on one measure or another,” explained Planas, who shows that he is Products on which VAT was not reduced increased by 1.6 percent in Januarywhile the data recorded in the first month of 2023 show a decrease in products for which VAT has been reduced.

The Minister of Agriculture pointed out that it is clear to the Government that this is clear “When there is a problem, he goes to the root and tries to solve it” and that he “continues to analyze scenarios and see which measures are most effective”.

Asked about United We Can’s statements about the big supermarket chains “making a fortune” and their proposals to limit prices, Minister Planas commented that “what the Government decides are the decisions that come from the Council of Ministers”. “The world is full of well-intentioned ideas, because there are very few good ones. My concern is solving problems and analyzing the situation,” he said.

Regarding the sustainability of the 14.4% bonus on the basket insisted on by Podemos, Planas explained that “there are not even a hundred benevolent or not ideas”, because what you are looking at “is what is happening in the rest of the European Union and in fact there are not many cases in which we could draw inspiration from.