Tobacco Growers Threaten To Paralyze Macedonia

After sporadically blocking regional roads and railway lines in the past two weeks, striking tobacco growers say they will start permanently blocking border crossings, highways and international rail routes this week.

On Tuesday, strikers blocked all road entrances to the capital, Skopje, for several hours, adding that they would start blocking border crossings on Wednesday.

"We are simply demanding a solution to our problems," the strike leader, Kire Nedelkovski, said, announcing a stepping up of protests.

Demanding an agreed average price of just over 3 euro per kilo, growers have stopped delivering tobacco to the handful of big private buyers, who they say are trying to deceive them of their wages by assessing their tobacco below its true quality.

"With prices as low as one euro per kilo we cannot survive," Nedelkovski said.

The government has condemned the strike as politically motivated. "Members of the opposition [Social Democrats] are infiltrating the tobacco producers and encouraging blockades and unrest," the Prime Minister, Nikola Gruevski, said over the weekend.

Maintaining that his government will continue to mediate between producers and buyers, Gruevski warned producers that if they failed to ship their tobacco to the purchasing stations, they “will not be able to use [state] subsidies". The government plans to set aside some 22 million euro on tobacco subsidies this year.

Producers accused the Prime Minister of blackmail. Some strikers have complained of police brutality. Others said they and their families had received threats to their safety.

Gruevski insisted that the authorities were doing all they could to ensure a just assessment of tobacco values. Government inspections were working and they were fining buyers who offered unrealistic prices, he said.

Although in constant decline over the past two decades, tobacco production remains a strategic pillar of Macedonian agriculture. The country produces some 19 million kilos of unprocessed tobacco a year, which makes it the leader in this sector in the Balkans. Almost 70 per cent of agricultural land reserved for industrial plants in Macedonia is dedicated to tobacco.