Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-10-Speech-2-056"
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"en.20040210.3.2-056"2
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"Mr President – unfortunately I cannot add ‘Commissioner Fischler’, as his seat is empty – ladies and gentlemen, the interest of this own-initiative report on trends in agricultural incomes in the European Union lies more in the questions it raises than in the answers it seeks to give. Its starting point is beyond dispute. We can use whatever fine words we want about the European agricultural model – multifunctional, kind to the environment and animal welfare, guaranteeing food safety, covering all our territories – but if the players are not there to implement it, that is farmers with enough income to do what they have to do, to live from their activities and attract the next generation, then the model will remain a utopia, a mirage, semantics, a lie.
The problem the report describes is indeed the one we are going to have to face in the years ahead. If the average income of the Community farmer – an abstract and therefore artificial statistical concept – has not already collapsed further despite the policy of systematically cutting prices, it has been at the price of very severe restructurings characterised by a dramatic reduction in the number of people working on farms and a very rapid increase in the concentration of farms together with the intensification of production. But if we want to maintain the greatest number of farmers on all the territory of the Member States in future, we will no longer be able to have this trilogy of disappearance, concentration and intensiveness. Europe can no longer count on those types of adjustment to maintain its agriculture and develop its agricultural model. Neither can it count any longer on an increase in the agricultural budget to cover the extra costs that the new standards concerning multifunctionality demanded by society will entail. Quite the contrary, that budget is set to decline over the next ten years, with no prospect of a reversal of that trend in sight.
Unlike the rapporteur, I believe that the June 2003 reform, which was inspired primarily by non-agricultural considerations – the desire to reach a general agreement in the WTO and a desire to make budget savings – offers little prospect of a solution to the problem. On the contrary, with decoupling it is more likely to accelerate concentration, intensification and land speculation, all trends which will have the effect of deterring young people from taking up farming and accelerating the monetarisation of the sector. If we want to avoid all this, we must redefine the concept of Community preferences and we cannot put off doing so indefinitely. When there are emergent countries with structural production conditions that utterly destroy the competitiveness of European agriculture, it is irresponsible to believe that only a policy of product quality or niche products will produce sufficient incomes to enable our farmers to continue occupying all our territories while providing society with the products and production conditions it wants."@en1
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