Agriculture, EU – Baltic States, Financial Services, Legislation, Lithuania, Markets and Companies, Strike

The demonstration, which drew several hundreds of protesters, started near the house of parliament on Wednesday morning. Farmers brought a cow’s skeleton in a car trailer to the site of the picket and some of the protesters disguised as cows.

“If it is impossible to solve the problem in an amicable way, the next step may be the blocking of roads,” Andriejus Stancikas, president of the Lithuanian Chamber of Agriculture who joined the protesters, told BNS.

He spoke of a special fund, which could help improve the situation in the dairy sector, and also said that the authorities should reimburse the losses sustained by farmers due to the so-called modulation, i.e. the reduction of direct payments.

The Lithuanian parliament last week passed legislative amendments providing for regulation of milk prices. This, however, drew a negative response from many milk processing companies and some dairy farmers.

Dairy farmers should be paid 18 million euros in compensation from the budget early in April. In February, Lithuania asked the European Commission to provide additional 75 million euros in support for the country’s dairy sector.