For a second day running, the junction near Robovo was blocked. Pepper growers from Strumica producing the „kurtovska kapija” variety are demanding 50 denars per kilogram for first class - and they are not leaving the road until they get a concrete answer.

The demand is worked out, not thrown together: first class at 50 denars, mixed first and second at 40, second class at 20. The growers' position is that this year's price for the ajvar pepper must not fall below 45 denars per kilogram. They are also asking for purchase prices set in advance and valid across the whole season, payment for delivered quantities within three months, and payment of subsidies which, they say, went unpaid from last season.

That is not a price list. That is an attempt to set, in advance, the line below which growing the crop stops making economic sense.

The growers say that under current purchase terms they can barely cover their costs - seed material, working the land, crop protection, irrigation and labour. One of them said at the protest that the wind destroyed more than 30 of his greenhouses where he grows peppers.

Traffic towards Robovo, Murtino and Bansko was interrupted and diverted for two hours at a time. The protest was organised by the association from Murtino.

What you see on the road is a blockade. What sits underneath it is something else. The grower enters the season with known costs and an unknown price for his own labour. Fuel, fertiliser, seed and wages are paid up front at prices the market dictates. The price of the peppers is discovered at the end, at the buying point, when there is nowhere left to turn back to.

The agriculture minister was announced for a meeting with growers, buyers and processors. This is the model that repeats every season: a road gets blocked, a meeting gets scheduled, some kind of deal gets struck, and the following year the same people are at the same junction.

Every autumn Macedonia talks about ajvar as national identity. The question rarely asked is what that identity costs the person who plants the peppers - and why, after all these years, there is still no mechanism that tells him what he will earn before he sows.