I don’t think anybody is suggesting that the price paid constitutes abuse. But the terms imposed, as described by Joe T, do.

If there is a courgette surplus, instead of consumer getting lots of cheap courgettes, (which is what would happen in a free market), the farmers have to dump them. It’s the sort of thing that we would expect to happen in a planned economy. Why? Because a monopoly is a planned economy, and the closer we get to it, the more like a planned economy things will look.

“After all, they wouldn’t have that power, unless the consumers wouldn’t have voluntarily given it to them.”

Sure, X gives Y power, Y uses it against Z. I don’t see how the voluntary nature of the X-Y relationship implies that Y cannot be coercive against Z.

“You as a consumer can choose to use only small shops, keeping them thus alive, and stop complaining.”

Gee, why should I care about suppliers? That would be like cutting off my own head and handing it to you on a plate, etc, etc.

I would rather the market were freer on a point of principle. I am not a farmer or a supermarket, so it has little to do with my own interests.

Tristan:

“Again we come back to subsidies keeping farmers in business when under free market conditions they would have gone bust, thus distorting the market.”

Indeed. And this is probably the cause of the problem. Without subsidised over-supply, the fewer farmers that remained would be in a much stronger bargaining position.

So perhaps we should celebrate supermarket abuse of suppliers as a natural correction to farm subsidies!

If the contract is not good then the farmer should not sign it and should look for other avenues of revenue or get out of farming.

If people are selling at a loss then that means that there’s an excess of supply, not that supermarkets are subverting economic laws somehow.

Again we come back to subsidies keeping farmers in business when under free market conditions they would have gone bust, thus distorting the market.

The farmer gains from neither of these transactions but is forced into them because the supermarket is practically their only customer - and that is coercion.

In a market with more, smaller buyers (and no subsidies!) supply and demand would be balanced, prices would be elastic and not fixed, and no-one would be forced into selling at a loss - that supermarkets have managed to suspend the normal rules of supply and demand should be deeply troubling to anyone who believes in free markets!

There are other forms of coercion than threats of physical violence, as you well know!

Supermarkets routinely have contracts with farmers that force them to meet the supermarket’s demand on a day-to-day basis at a fixed per-unit price. If they fail to fulfill their orders they are threatened with financial penalties or the loss of future orders.

As you can imagine, this ruins the normal demand curve - if a farmer over-produces he has to sell his excess produce at a loss on the (practically moribund) wholesale food market; if he under-produces he is forced to air-freight in produce from abroad at an even bigger loss.

The farmer gains from neither of these transactions but is forced into them because the supermarket

Duncan:
The market distortions are not of their making though. The whole planning process distorts the market.
Distortion of the market comes from use of coercion, which unless Tesco are breaking legs or threatening people comes from the government (perhaps at Tesco’s request, but that’s still government force).

As to your assertion that you are a Liberal not a libertarian, libertarians are liberals (although not necessarily Liberals). You seem to be asking for the world to be forced into your view of how it should work, which is not liberal.

You also still do not understand the meaning of free in this context. The market in which superstores exist is not made unfree by their existence. Nothing about that is unfree. If small shops cannot exist because people are lazy, then that is a consequence of freedom. Freedom does not mean the freedom to run any business you like and to succeed. Freedom means the ability to pursue that given you have the resources without coercion from another body.