Jobbik demands urgent measures against food price increase

Jobbik demands that the government should take immediate measures to mitigate the effects of the unprecedented drought and record food price increases in Hungary, the deputy leader of the opposition party said on Wednesday.

Hungary is suffering “a brutal drought unseen before”, Zoltán Magyar told a press conference. “It is affecting 700,000 hectares of arable land which will yield no crop to harvest in the autumn at all, leaving farmers with zero revenue,” he said.

Magyar said the government had lied in promising earlier to double the size of land under irrigation by 2020, insisting that irrigation “had not been introduced in any additional inch of land” ever since. To remedy the situation, Jobbik proposes to build artificial reservoirs to collect rainwater for irrigation purposes, he said.

• Read also: Will 5-forint coins disappear in Hungary because of inflation?

To help farmers, Jobbik proposes that the government should grant them in a pre-financing scheme an interest-free loan for the purchase of crop seeds and insecticides, Magyar said.

He said the drought will push up food prices by 30 to 40 percent this year which will seriously affect customers. Jobbik therefore calls for reducing the value-added tax of basic food items to zero percent, he said.

Read alsoJobbik calls on Novák to convene ‘national crisis council’ over economic crisis

Source: MTI