Foreign products dominate the food packages of students in many municipalities

For students who have to study remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic, schools are providing food parcels in place of lunches. However, local processors and primary agricultural raw material producers are puzzled as to why these parcels contain so few Latvian-made products. While farmers struggle with the impact of Covid-19 and the government is looking for various support mechanisms to mitigate the crisis in the agricultural sector as well, foreign products dominate the food parcels of many Latvian municipalities.

School meals are supervised by the Food and Veterinary Service, and municipalities are responsible for the contents of the packages distributed. The Ministry of Health website lists the nutritional values for students, but these only serve as recommendations, and municipalities decide for themselves what to do and what to include in the packages.

Instead of including more fresh fruits, vegetables, and other locally sourced products in students' food packages, municipalities are creating packages with foreign canned goods, dry cereals, juices, dairy products, chocolates, and cookies.

Since the spring of this year, Latvia has seen a significant drop in the purchase price of milk, which the state has tried to compensate for with various support mechanisms. In Latvia, we produce twice as much milk as we consume ourselves, so we export what is left in the form of raw milk. Therefore, it is not clear why several municipalities prefer Polish and Lithuanian dairy products in school food packages. There are factories and companies in Latvia that produce milk with a shelf life of up to 16 days. In turn, municipalities that do not include packaged milk in their food packages can replace it with cottage cheese, kefir, yogurt or other dairy products produced in Latvia.

ZSA Board Chairman Juris Lazdins: "The position of local governments on choosing foreign products is not clear. It is the municipalities that benefit from local farmers, processing companies and their tax payers, which also go into the budgets of local governments. Therefore, local governments have the obligation not only to provide students with food products, but also to support local farmers and processing companies. We invite local government students to assemble food packages exclusively from food products grown and produced in Latvia.”