Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-01-16-Speech-2-187"
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"en.20010116.10.2-187"2
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"Mr President, could I begin by congratulating Mr Parish on bringing forward a very excellent report. I know very well that he put a lot of time and effort into it and I am happy it can be debated by Parliament today.
It is a very difficult subject to address and there is no easy solution to the problem of young farmers, as any of us who have any knowledge of the problem and the background would accept.
Of course, everybody likes to say we must help the young farmers. The problem is when you ask them how to make the help really worthwhile, they are very slow to come forward with answers. How can you encourage young people onto the land? You have to address the problem within the situation in which young people find themselves today. Many young people from rural areas some 20, 30 or 40 years ago, at the time Mr McCartin was speaking about, would naturally have gone on to become young farmers.
Nowadays those young people have many other options open to them. They look around and they see their friends going into jobs where they may quit working at lunchtime on Friday and not start work again until the Monday morning. But the young farmer will work seven days a week for very little money. You only have to look at the financial situation right throughout the European Union at the moment to see that we have a terrible problem here and one that is not going to be easy to address. The reality is that if you do not get young people into the industry, you will not bring the new ideas in and you will not allow the industry to develop and take on the challenges that it faces in the future, relating not just to the production of food, but to how that food is produced and to ensuring that it is produced in a way the consumer finds acceptable.
It is not enough just to give financial assistance to young farmers because then all you do is put the price of lamb up out of reach. We in the European Union have brought in milk quotas, we have brought in suckler cow quotas, we have brought in sheep quotas, all now with a financial value that the young farmer could not even begin to contemplate. So I believe the best way is to make it easier for young farmers to inherit the family farm at an earlier stage, be it through an early retirement scheme or through a bond scheme. I certainly feel that the European Investment Bank should be encouraged to help young farmers into the industry through the bond scheme.
But, if you are going to bring this scheme in it has to be mandatory and it has to be introduced in every Member State. It is not enough to introduce it in one Member State alone.
Finally, we are spending a lot of money on rural development and the Commission would do well to look at other ways of spending that money, because, as I see it, we could make better use of it. We could encourage young farmers, who face so much red tape and bureaucracy now. Young farmers have computers. Farmers' wives know how to use computers and could use them on the farm. That is the way forward for the future."@en1
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