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ARCHIVED - Spain warns that panic buying will inflate price of sunflower oil
Several supermarkets in Spain have already rationed the amount of oil shoppers can buy
The cost of many consumer products, including groceries, fuel and textiles, has been increasing ceaselessly for a number of months now, and the crisis in Ukraine has exacerbated matters further.
Farmers are panicking because supplies of cereals for feed and fertilisers for crops are dwindling, staples such as bread are rising in price due to a lack of flour and electricity and oil are in a never-ending upward spiral thanks to Europe’s dependency on Russia for energy.
The latest casualty has been sunflower oil – and sunflower seeds to a lesser extent – bottles of which have been cleared from the shelves in supermarkets across Spain as people panic buy in anticipation of a national shortage. This country depends on Ukraine for a substantial 60% of its sunflower imports, but the Organisation of Consumers and Users (OCU) has this week called for calm, insisting that Spain is nowhere close to running out.
Firstly, there is an abundance of this product at the moment since stores are currently selling last summer’s harvest, long before the war broke out, and secondly, until the next harvest, Spanish farmers are producing plenty of other vegetable oil alternatives, such as soybean and rapeseed.
And of course, the OCU has reminded people, Spain is the world’s leading producer of olive oil.
The organisation has heavily criticised the decision of some of the major supermarkets, such as Mercadona and Consum, to ration the sale of sunflower oil, since “it generates growing alarm among consumers and favours, therefore, the rise in its price.” In fact, the price of oil has, along with so many other products, been rising for the last year as a result of inflation and is already relatively expensive.
Furthermore, the OCU has pointed out that limiting the number of items that can be purchased by each shopper is prohibited under the Retail Trade Law. The group has also warned consumers not to compulsively store sunflower oil as it generally only has a best before date of around a year, after which time it loses quality and begins to go rancid.
Acabo de ir a mi mercadona y están limitando el aceite de girasol y apenas queda cuando solía estar lleno , ni garrafas de girasol quedan , ( el día 4 de marzo compre una botella de 1 Litro a 1,90 y a 7 de marzo esta a 2,50€ ) esto da miedito pic.twitter.com/eRgyHta5Mj
— jorge Rodriguez 🇮🇨 (@jorgeBluBlu555) March 7, 2022
Image: @jorgeBluBlu55 on Twitter
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