Slovakia leads EU charge to rein in supermarket power

BRUSSELS — Richard Takáč, Slovakia’s agriculture minister in Robert Fico’s populist government, has emerged as the face of a renewed Eastern bloc campaign to curb the power of supermarkets and multinational food giants in the European Union.

Backed by Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania and Slovenia, Takáč is calling on the European Commission to go beyond updates it proposed in December to the EU’s rules on unfair trading practices.

In a note circulated ahead of a meeting of EU agriculture ministers in Brussels on Monday, the coalition argued that the reforms fail to address practices like selective pricing strategies and the sale of goods at prices below the cost of production, which disproportionately harm farmers and consumers in smaller markets.

Eastern Europe’s food supply chain is shaped by foreign supermarket chains like Lidl, Tesco, Spar and Auchan, which have entrenched themselves as key players in the retail landscape.

While the note does not single out specific actors, the foreign retailers’ strong bargaining power has sparked long-running tensions with governments, which accuse them of driving down prices and squeezing traditional shops out of business.

The Commission’s December proposal sought to address complaints from farmers by empowering national authorities to investigate cross-border abuses and mandating contracts to ensure pricing transparency.

Big buyers, bigger problems

But Takáč and his allies insist that deeper structural changes are needed to tackle the dominance of powerful buyers and secure fairer conditions for weaker players in the food supply chain.

“First and foremost, there is a need to increase the protection of … farmers, but also processors and food producers,” the note reads, adding that “it is also important to increase the protection of the final consumer against the abuse of the position by dominant entities.”

Governments across Eastern Europe have introduced measures in the past to curb supermarkets’ influence — such as taxes, price caps and requirements to stock local produce — but these have often clashed with EU single market rules.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has taken particularly aggressive steps, targeting foreign supermarkets with levies, price caps, and policies favoring local ownership — measures critics say are designed to drive international players out of the market.

Takáč’s latest campaign at the EU level reflects similar frustrations and mirrors his domestic agenda.

At home, he has championed measures to protect Slovak producers, including a proposed constitutional amendment in late 2024 requiring retailers to stock a minimum proportion of local food — even though the Czech Republic and Romania abandoned similar efforts over potential EU legal challenges. His ministry has also pledged to impose a levy on retail chains and mandate that at least 50 percent of Slovak food products feature in store promotions.

Slovakia, alongside Poland and Hungary, also maintains an illegal embargo on Ukrainian farm imports. Takáč frames this as a necessary step to protect domestic producers, signaling the government’s willingness to defy EU rules when it comes to safeguarding national interests.