Seventeen denars a kilo. That is what peppers fetch in Obrshani and Debreshte, while part of the crop rots unsold. SDSM leader Venko Filipche has proposed an intervention purchase with a guaranteed price of 30 denars a kilo and compensation for the destroyed crop.

The gap between those two numbers is almost double. The question neither side in this argument answers is why the market price is so low - whether because there is overproduction, because the processing plants are shut, or because the buyers know the grower has nowhere else to take produce that spoils within days.

"Farmers are asking for help, asking for a solution and asking for someone to listen to them. The government is ignoring them," Filipche said, adding that SDSM is ready to submit a draft law in parliament.

Two versions of the same harvest

The government tells the story differently. Agriculture minister Borche Serafimovski announced this week that more than 54 million kilos of grapes had already been taken up by domestic wineries or placed on foreign markets - which is a figure about grapes, not peppers.

And there is the quiet problem. The opposition is talking about peppers and tobacco, the government answers with a grape number. Both sides are telling the truth, but about different crops, and in that mismatch nobody answers the concrete question: how many tonnes of peppers have been purchased so far, and at what price.

The list of problems Filipche cites does not concern one crop alone - grapes, milk, wheat, early vegetables, tobacco, all with the same pattern: trouble finding a buyer, a squeezed price, and subsidies unpaid or reduced. In Debreshte, the opposition says, tobacco growers lost their crop entirely to the summer storms.

An intervention purchase is a tool that exists precisely for situations like this, and it was not invented by one party - it has been used before, by different governments. But it is also the most expensive possible answer: the state pays the price difference for a product the market rejected. If that repeats every season, for every crop, then the intervention is not a solution but an annual expense.

The real measure of how seriously the problem is taken will only be visible in parliament. A draft law submitted by the opposition in September has a precisely determined fate if the majority does not want to open it - and that will show whether this is a solution or a position taken in front of voters in farming municipalities.