The Ministry of Agriculture has prepared a new draft recall on the amendments of Irina Yarovoy. The Ministry of Agriculture as a whole supported the bill of deputies on the ban on retail chains to return unsold products to suppliers.
At the same time, the ministry is confident that by the second reading in the State Duma the project concept should still change: only perishable products, for example bread, should be returned to suppliers, and not all items. This was reported to Izvestia in the press service of the ministry. For the first time, the bread producers announced the problem of returns, although later they agreed with retail chains and now consider the problem settled.
The Ministry of Agriculture has written a new draft recall on amendments to existing legislation, prepared by deputies of the State Duma, headed by Vice Speaker Irina Yarova. They imply a ban on retailers to return products to suppliers. According to the press service of the department, Izvestia was informed that on June 12 a document with the position of the ministry was submitted to the government. At the end of February 2018, deputies introduced amendments to the State Duma on the principles of state regulation of trade activities and on the development of agriculture.
The document proposed to prohibit retailers from entering into agreements that stipulate a condition for the return of unsold goods to a supplier after a certain period of time. Over the past few years, trade has increased the number of returns of quality products to domestic producers, the explanatory note said. Suppliers were forced to buy them back. To a greater extent, this affected the bakers. For individual enterprises in the regions, the return reaches 50% of the total supply, up to 30% in the case of meat products, noted in the explanatory note. In this case, the return of products practically does not occur, if we are talking about foreign suppliers.
The Ministry of Agriculture supported the adoption of the initiative in the first reading to finalize it in the second. The Office made comments on the text of the draft. In particular, to the clause that prohibits concluding an agreement with the condition of the return of food products not sold after a certain period. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, this provision requires additional study: the establishment of such a ban may lead to the impossibility of returning goods in cases where it is provided by law. For example, by agreement of the parties, by a court decision, when replacing goods of inadequate quality or incomplete goods.
The Office considers it necessary to provide in the bill a provision on the possibility of returning to suppliers of products with short implementation periods (that is, up to 10 days). This is possible provided that the assortment of such goods is rotated - that is, in the case of daily product updates in stores with the help of additional deliveries from new lots. This will help the supplier not to lose shelf space. In general, the adoption of the bill will create more favorable conditions for the development of domestic production and providing the food market with quality products, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.
The position of the agency will form the basis of the recall of the government. In the spring, the government has already formed a positive draft of its recall based on the opinion of the Ministry of Agriculture. As a Izvestia source in the Cabinet told, the document was sent for revision to the government commission on legislative activities. Later, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak held a meeting on this bill, as a result, the Ministry of Agriculture was instructed to submit a new draft recall to the White House by June 13, Izvestia's source said.
The press secretary of the Deputy Speaker Irina Yarovoy declined to comment. Chairman of the Presidium of the Association of Retail Companies (AKORT, which unites the country's largest retailers) Sergei Belyakov told Izvestia: "We are against the ban on returns in principle." He stressed that some of the grounds for returns are directly provided for by the current legislation, with which the Ministry of Agriculture agrees. In his opinion, the very rule prohibiting returns in conditions when relations are properly regulated by current legislation, the Civil Code and the powers of the FAS looks excessive.
“Practice shows that the most effective way to regulate contractual relations is through dialogue between participants in civil law relations,” said Sergey Belyakov. - That is, the solution lies in the field of self-regulation, a mechanism that has proved its effectiveness, and not only in the field of trade.
ACORT specified that the issue of returns is already being decided by companies and their partners. So for bakery products, the problem is not relevant today. The average number of returns in the total volume of deliveries to retail chains is small. The head of the executive committee of the National Meat Association, Sergei Yushin, believes that the return may be relevant for products with a long shelf life of more than 10 days. According to him, "if the products are not sold, then the manufacturer may be interested in picking it up from the distribution network and selling it through another channel." On July 24, the State Duma unanimously adopted a bill banning retailers from returning products in the first reading.
Source: https://iz.ru/