Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-15-Speech-5-044"
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"en.20001215.3.5-044"2
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"Mr President, today I have rather more time than my group usually allows me. First of all, I should like to congratulate Mr Dary on his good report. I should not like to discuss the details of the report, however, because it is fine as it stands. After all, colleagues have talked about it. I should just like to express a few simple truths at the end of the year. Firstly, this is about the fact that PR measures are to be implemented to promote the European model of agriculture, as you said. I should like to make it clear in this connection that within this European model of agriculture we still do not have codecision; neither for this report nor for bananas. We write our report, we do our work, and if the Council does not like it then it does what it wants. Progress on this point was not forthcoming in Nice either.
Yesterday, as you know, I remarked rather sarcastically that we had come a step further; the opposite is, of course, the case. I do not think that we should relax our efforts to move towards codecision.
I have a few more truths to tell: if we are talking about PR, but have to tackle BSE, then perhaps it would be a good idea to grasp the fact that cows belong in fields. It is as simple as that. If they had stayed in the fields then we would not have had BSE.
Or what about when people say that we have a shortage of protein? If Parliament's proposals to allow legumes and clover to be grown on set-aside land and be used for animal feed had been implemented – they have been passed by a majority three times here, but that shows yet again how powerless Parliament is – then we would have had more basic rations and more protein feed. Then, you see, the cows would have stayed in the fields and we would not have had to use meat meal as animal feed. A simple truth, if people are now saying that we could not guarantee calf feed because there was no milk replacer feed, is that calves drink milk. If we want something for the machines than surely we can powder whole milk. The practice of mixing a fat into calf feed which comes from meat meal production – which in any case is highly dubious given the risk of BSE transmission – creates in my opinion a centre of infection for young animals. Why do we not say in this case that we will put butter into the calves' feed? After all, we have enough of it. Here, too, the question of the European agricultural model arises.
The next point concerns aid. There are farms of the same size, not one small and one large but of the same size, where one receives DEM 15 000 per worker and the other receives DEM 150 000 per worker. This means that the second farmer receives more than it costs him to pay his employees. If I received as much as that per worker on my 50-hectare farm, then I would take on five more people. I have to pay the five people whom I employ out of the profits from what I produce and not out of the money from Brussels. We need to agree on social criteria here which guarantee reasonably equal treatment if we are going to assume that agriculture also wants to offer jobs.
Mr Verheugen, you are familiar with the debate surrounding the new Member States and the question of whether they will receive the compensatory payments or not. If they receive the compensatory payments in the same way as we do here then we will have the same problem, namely that we will not promote job creation but that, basically, we will set in motion a job destruction machine because people want to be able to use the premiums which they draw from Brussels in a lucrative way.
The next point relates to exports and intervention. Animals are still being transported because we subsidise live exports of calves. If we were to abolish this practice then we would no longer need to talk about these consignments of animals or the pictures with which we are familiar from the media. These are all ways in which we present ourselves to the world, and we come across in a negative, not a positive light.
The fact that there are alternatives is something which Mr Garot showed in his report when, for once, with pigs, we tried to develop a market organisation which was actually designed to benefit farming and safeguard farming structures. This does not stand a chance, though. The only ray of hope is the regulation on organic farming and, in Germany, recently, there has been much talk of a superior culture. If we take organic farming as the superior culture of agricultural policy, then I think that we ought to adopt further measures which are basically quite straightforward. This would also make it possible for us to use PR measures to inform the public – including the public outside Europe – about our good food production system and to convince them of its worth."@en1
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