Almeria: Growers shipping produce north from Spain’s greenhouse belt are still waiting on the European Commission’s promised rewrite of the EU’s unfair trading rules, an initiative the 2026 work programme pencilled in for the third quarter, a window that closes in six weeks.
The revision matters more than its dry title suggests. Directive 2019/633 has applied since 2022 and bans a list of black practices outright: paying a supplier later than 30 days for perishable food, cancelling perishable orders at short notice, changing supply terms unilaterally. A second grey list, covering returns of unsold goods or charging suppliers for marketing, is permitted only where both sides agreed in advance.
The Commission’s own evaluation, published on 1 December 2025, found the architecture sound and the enforcement weak. Suppliers know their rights poorly. Those who do know them frequently decline to use them, because a complaint against a retailer controlling access to a national market invites retaliation. The evaluation calls this the fear factor, and it explains why enforcement statistics look healthier than farm-gate reality.
Brussels has already patched one gap. Regulation (EU) 2026/697, published on 20 March, builds a cooperation framework so a national authority chasing a buyer registered in another member state no longer stalls at the border. That fixes jurisdiction. It does nothing about the imbalance that keeps suppliers quiet in the first place.
The politically explosive element sits elsewhere. The work programme floats the principle that farmers should not be forced to systematically sell their products below production costs, and Parliament backed the same idea in its resolution of 10 September 2025 on the post-2027 common agricultural policy. Written into a directive, that principle would move EU law from policing contract conduct to policing price, a line the single market has generally refused to cross.
Retailers and processors will fight it hard, and their argument is not frivolous. Production costs vary enormously between a Dutch glasshouse and a Romanian smallholding, so any legal floor either sits so low it binds nobody or so high it prices efficient producers out. Enforcement authorities would also need cost data they currently have no power to collect.
Farm organisations counter that the alternative is the status quo, which produced protests across the bloc from 2024 onwards and a strategic dialogue that recommended this revision outright. They have a point about momentum. Unfair trading reform remains one of the few Vision for Agriculture and Food commitments carrying a date.
The call for evidence and public consultation closed on 27 February, so drafting now happens behind closed doors. Whether the proposal lands in September or slips into the fourth quarter, as several analysts expect, will tell farmers how much political capital the Commission intends to spend. The Commission keeps the file on its unfair trading practices page, and Parliament tracks it on the legislative train.
