THE Government was failing to protect food suppliers from the enormous purchasing power of supermarkets, despite a code of practice set up to regulate supermarkets' price wars, according to the Country Land and Business Association.

Dr Charles Trotman, CLA rural economy adviser, said the latest House of Commons report on the rise in cheap labour on farms was further evidence of the pressure put on food suppliers to provide cheap produce or face the chop.

"The EFRA Select Committee report on gangmasters is a damning indictment of the supermarkets' practice of squeezing the life out of suppliers," he said. "There s no point having a code of practice which does nothing to curb supermarkets' power and only has the four main retailers and signatories."

The code of practice for supermarkets in their dealing with suppliers came into force in March, 2002. The code also allows suppliers to report alleged abuses. Dr Trotman said the very fact that no abuses had been reported did not mean that the code was working. The very opposite was true because suppliers were unwilling to complain for fear of having their contracts

John Mortimer, CLA director in Gloucestershire, added: "It is surely in everybody's interests, from the producer through to the consumer, that any controls or codes of practice are effective and properly enforced. The supermarkets themselves have a key role to play in their won supply chain management.