Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-10-Speech-2-055"
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"en.20040210.3.2-055"2
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"Mr President, this report is a good initiative and I congratulate its author. In fact, it brings us up to date on agricultural incomes just before the application of CAP reform and the enlargement of the European Union. It will therefore serve us as a reference document in a few years’ time, when, I hope, we shall be meeting together in this Assembly again to consider the consequences of the reform for our farmers’ incomes. Will the accession of ten new countries that are themselves highly agricultural and the alignment of European agricultural prices with world prices bring us a better future? I do not want to be a prophet of doom, but unfortunately I doubt it.
This report underlines some important facts, in particular the 7% increase in European agricultural incomes over seven years, which hides many disparities between regions and sectors and is rooted in a degradation of the European agricultural model, as the rapporteur pointed out in his address. In ten years, one quarter of Europe’s farmers have vanished, farms have become larger and production has intensified.
Some French small farmers have such low incomes that the French Government gives them access to the ‘integration minimum income’, a system of social support reserved for the most deprived. I come from the Vosges, a rural
not far from here. Between 1988 and 2000, the number of farms there fell by 40% and the number of dairy farms halved. At the same time, farm areas increased 65% and the number of cows per farm 30%. This concentration in agriculture is damaging to the European family agricultural model, as the Parliamentary report very clearly shows.
Decoupled aids are not a viable solution for the farmer. According to the Nantes INRA study, in 2008 partial decoupling could result in as much as a 32% drop in simulated income for an intensive dairy farmer because the decoupled aids will not compensate for the 20% fall in the price of milk envisaged for 2006-2008.
The drafting of this report gave an opportunity to consult a number of experts on the subject. They all underlined this intrinsic paradox of the latest common agricultural policy reform. How indeed can we think of pushing up costs through multifunctionality while at the same time wanting agricultural prices to fall by bringing European prices into line with world prices? What solution is there for farmers trapped between rising production costs and falling prices. No expert has been able to tell us that.
Finally, the report explains a risk that is of particular concern to me, namely the eco-conditionality of aids for small farms, since their income is going to depend increasingly on aids, especially with decoupling. A small farmer who failed to comply with one of a very large number of directives, including the Loiseau directive, would have his aids, and therefore his income, cut off. The incomes of farmers who are already fragile and who have little capacity to invest will be reduced.
This report puts its finger on the painful points of the common agricultural policy and its latest reform, and I can only welcome these facts being brought out into the open. However, some parts of the report remain ambiguous and I cannot support them. I cannot ask the Member States, and I quote: ‘to ensure that partial decoupling is actually applied’, because I have always opposed any form of decoupling, be it partial or total. Likewise, I am not in favour of, and I quote: ‘ensuring a readjustment in favour of the second pillar’. The first pillar, which allows farmers to maintain a lucrative price for agricultural products, cannot be weakened in order to subsidise the second.
This Parliamentary report has the merit of clearly presenting some important and sometimes painful realities of the common agricultural policy. However, it includes an ambiguous support for key aspects of the CAP reform, against which my group has spoken out, and that is why I will find it very difficult to support it."@en1
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