The Director General of Trade, Miquel Piñol, presented the 1st Modernisation Plan for Open-Air Street Markets of the Balearic Islands at a conference on street trade held this Monday in Rivas Vaciamadrid.

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The Government’s programme of stimuli and incentives for individual and collective projects for the transformation and modernisation of open-air street markets will have a budget of up to 100,000 euros and will be included in the 2022 and 2023 calls of the Technological Fund, within the framework of the “digital transformation of street trade and short marketing channels”.

The aim of the Vice-Presidency and Regional Ministry for Energy Transition, Productive Sectors and Democratic Memory is to address, through the Directorate-General for Trade, some key factors relating to street vending in many of our municipalities that the COVID-19 crisis revealed to us: open-air markets serve many municipalities without sufficient commercial offer; they are the preferred sales channel for local and zero-kilometre production, and also for specialised sectors such as crafts; they avoid food deserts, especially for fresh produce, and they prevent the movement of people with reduced mobility.

“This will be the first time that the Balearic Islands administration has taken the sector and street vendors into consideration in active trade policies,” said Piñol. “It is a group that has been neglected until now, and we are talking about almost 2,000 workers”.

The Modernisation Plan will include actions such as: training in management and technology; stock control; electronic payments (mobile phones, contactless cards, etc.); traceability and product identification using QR codes; the creation of wifi or 5G areas; mobile or fixed; the establishment of street markets as a delivery point, or aesthetic homogenisation (corporate image of open-air shopping centres), etc.