Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-10-Speech-2-140"
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"en.20040210.6.2-140"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, let me too start by thanking Mr Garot for his own-initiative report.
Income policy in the agricultural sector has a direct influence on the attractiveness of the farming life, and consequently on the continuation of agricultural production; connected with the effect it has on rural development. Europe’s farmers enjoy very widely differing levels of income. In recent years, agriculture has had to cope with profound structural change, and that is not yet over. Between 1995 and 2002 alone, the number of farms in the EU has decreased by an average of 15.7%. European farmer’s income consists in part of direct payments and not merely of production yield; moreover, the fall in prices for basic agricultural produce bears no relation to the way the prices paid by consumers for food have changed. In future, too, production costs will increase as a result of the greater demands made of agriculture, while farmers’ compensation payments will not be increased correspondingly.
What compensation payments must do is to guarantee that society’s needs are met: the desire for healthy and safe food and for an environment fit to live in. Compensation payments for agriculture are justified insofar as they reward its multifunctional services to society, above all – as Mr Santini said – in the mountainous, less-favoured, and peripheral regions of the EU. The European Union’s agriculture will also need a strong dose of entrepreneurship and an underlying production role. Farmers’ understanding of their own occupational role and their social status increasingly depend on to what extent the agricultural policy promotes farming enterprise. It is at this that the individual instruments must be targeted, but the common agricultural policy must not permit the first pillar to be played against the second.
Nor may we disregard the requirement that these agricultural policy instruments be provided over a specified period, thus making it possible to plan and act within a longer timeframe. There is no getting away from the Financial Perspective as a means of giving our farmers, to some extent, the certainty they need in order to plan ahead, which agriculture and rural areas need."@en1
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