I wasn’t talking about food, I was talking about quality food and there is a huge difference between the two. Great majority of the population today cannot afford quality foods (and I am not talking about caviar and truffles). Paying 500 euros per month is huge for an average family in Brussels, and they wouldn’t pay less. A couple pays easily 300…and that’s budget food.
I agree, not easy at all and it is essential to organise better. Both need to be done, bottom and the top.
Big support is needed at the top too, hopefully the new subsidies covering ecological production will create new initiatives.
Actually it wasn’t an argument at all, just a short summary of my thinking…which could be faulty as well 
. If I was making an argument I would elaborate much more for sure.
I am well aware of that aspect and the balance needed there Angelo. Croatia specifically is in a weird situation, as prices are way higher than the actual living standard can support (especially on the coast). Kuna is linked to Euro and is kept artificially quite high, not reflecting the real state of the economy. That’s way above my pay grade so I will not go into that.
I wrote elsewhere about that a bit more.
There is no one simple solution. We have to reshape our society. Having people migrate back to abandoned rural regions is necessary. There are many places all over Europe where people cannot even have businesses as there are no workers available. I know many municipalities like that in Croatia. Of course, there are solutions. I traveled all over Europe and saw a lot of good practices and I think outside of the box. Most people who grew up there and never went further than the nearby bigger city do not see those solutions or cannot implement them. The fact is also that the population in many EU countries has been losing the buying power. I remember how it was when I just arrived to Brussels…the prices of everything go up every year, new taxes are introduced…and salaries go up by a miserable amount. When I say that quality food needs to be cheap or affordable, I don’t mean that everything should be taken on by the producer.
I have spent very long time in people’s homes, both in well developed rural communities (those in proximity to bigger cities like Karlovac and Zagreb municipalities) and in Croatia’s poorest communities…spent a lot of time talking with those people to figure out how can I really help them. I did also a 3 month market research on the subject. I shared it with some LAGs so the result was they adopted my conclusions to their needs and created their local development strategies. I also started a big project based on it. The project was an answer to real needs of the population. It turned out to be too big for me at that time and, due to my inexperience (made some costly mistakes) and lack of funding, I had to stop it. Actually I had ways to fund it but I did not like that I had to become indebted to a political party to do it…i stayed out of politics and corruption for so many years so that was one compromise I wasn’t ready to make. Too bad, as the product was, and still is, much needed.
Next year I will start it again but, this time I will do it in just 1 municipality…keep it small. Make it a pilot project and test out things, then scale it if it makes sense.