Ograniczenie konsumenckiej ochrony prawnej osób fi zycznych prowadzących gospodarstwo rolne
Limitation of consumer legal protection for individuals running agricultural holdings

Summary/Abstract: The Act of 14 April 2023 on Consumer Pawnshop Loan amended the provisions of the Act of 23 April1964 Civil Code and the Act of 12 May 2011 on Consumer Credit. This amendment concernedthe extension of consumer protection to farmers with regard to the use of prohibited contractualprovisions by an entrepreneur, including a consumer credit lender, and the maximum amount ofnon-interest costs of a loan, as well as its collateral. The personal scope of the Consumer CreditAct was also extended to include natural persons running an agricultural holding. The introductionof these solutions became the subject of criticism from the fi nancial community, customer protectioninstitutions in the fi nancial market, and representatives of legislative institutions. Despite the shortperiod of validity of the provisions amending the Civil Code and the Consumer Credit Act, theproblem of consumer law protection of natural persons running a farm has become the subject ofanalyses by representatives of the legal doctrine, who critically assessed the introduced changesand their legal effects. The purpose of the article is to analyze consumer protection for farmers interms of prohibited contractual provisions, maximum non-deductible costs of a consumer loan andcredit, and selected rights under the provisions of the Consumer Credit Act. The article aims toprovide a critique of the mode of the introduction of provisions that extend the scope of consumerprotection to farmers. The rationale for analysing this problem is the observed trend of extendingconsumer protection to entities that do not have the status of consumers. The analysis showsthat the extension of consumer protection to natural persons running a farm was an unnecessarymeasure, and caused interpretation problems for many entities at the same time, including farmersthemselves and lenders, mainly banks. The methodology of the research consists of the analysis ofthe above-mentioned legal acts, the positions of selected institutions, bodies and representativesof the doctrine.

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