Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-26-Speech-4-063"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20001026.2.4-063"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
".
On the pretext of resolving a number of questions relating to fruit and vegetables, the Commission is proposing serious amendments to the regulations in question, even before the report has been finalised on the results of the previous regulations, which entered into force as recently as 1997. The Commission’s argument that these amendments regulate individual matters is completely hypocritical and misleading, given that the proposed amendments change the entire Common Organisation of the Market in processed fruit and vegetables, making it much worse for small and medium-sized farmers and much better for the trade and industry and the multinationals.
With processed tomatoes and peaches, it is using direct aid to producers as an excuse to propose abolishing the minimum price. This price may not provide satisfactory protection for producers, but it is nonetheless a minimum safety valve. Instead of proposing to enhance it and hence provide an efficient guaranteed agricultural income, the Commission is proposing to abolish it, leaving trade and industry free to step up their exploitation of farmers and trample on the fruits of their labours.
In addition, instead of proposing a substantial increase in quotas, the Commission is proposing to replace them with a system of thresholds so that, with subsidies rendered worthless by joint liability fines, farmers will be lured into producing quantities in excess of the thresholds, which the trade and industry will take as and when they please. Obviously, the quantities in excess of the thresholds produced by farmers will not have a ready market or a minimum price and will become another weapon in the hands of the trade and industry, which will blackmail farmers and set the price for the whole quantity, even the quantity below the threshold, at ridiculously low prices. The quotas and the thresholds are like Scylla and Charybdis and to change them is to jump out of the frying pan into the fire.
Add the unacceptably low national thresholds which decimate subsidies to the proposed reductions in withdrawals to 5% for citrus fruits, 8.5% for apples and pears and 10% for other fruit and vegetables in marketable quantities, and it soon becomes clear that there will be no way of disposing of very large quantities of processable fruits and vegetables with the result that overall prices will drop and the crops will be left to rot in the fields and in the cooperative packaging shops, forcing farmers to uproot their crops.
Finally, the Commission has lost no time in taking advantage of cyclical increases in international prices for processed fruit and vegetables during the last marketing year to set subsidies at low levels, subsidies which will apply for several years, i.e. until the next time the regulation is amended.
The proposals for fruit and vegetables are part of the more general, anti-farming direction which the EU is taking, now that it has decided to persecute farmers. This persecution hits the produce of small and medium-sized farmers in the south particularly hard. What we need are not attempts to improve on disastrous proposals, as Parliament's report endeavours to do. We need to reject these proposals wholesale and without equivocation and to call firmly for agricultural policy to be revised for the benefit of the farmers and the countryside."@en1
|
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples