Who will save family farms – family agricultural holdings? Agricultural production is dramatically declining. I have long known that the saviors of agriculture are neither the overly urban-oriented SDP, which is not interested in the countryside, nor the rural HDZ, which has always ingratiated itself to farmers only through generous transfers from the state treasury.
Believe it or not, the salvation lies in – shopping centers. I realized this at City plac, a part of City Center One transformed, in collaboration with Večernjak, into a real market. However, this market is not outdoors, so there won’t be the unique pleasure of shopping in the snow and rain. And I don’t have to rush to the market at dawn; the ‘kumice’ are there until the evening. And there are no middlemen. As far as I could detect, about twenty producers sell exclusively their own products.
Thus, one shopping center managed to do what all of Linić’s and Lalovac’s fiscalizations failed to achieve at the state level on any market. However, the space is not reserved for farmers of the caliber ‘one barn – one cow’. It is not just bare fruits and vegetables, cheese, and milk that are sold, but also processed products. These are products with higher added value, one might say – from homemade preserves to natural juices and homemade pasta.
