Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-03-11-Speech-2-217"
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"en.20080311.30.2-217"2
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"Mr President, the truth is that the extremely low prices that were paid to European milk producers for years caused major damage to the sector. They caused large-scale abandonment of the sector, especially in some regions such as my own, Galicia, and another of their consequences was that there were huge reductions in the strategic reserves of milk, which is a basic necessity.
I would like to say that, since 2007, the market has been developing positively, and in fact this is giving producers some respite, and even enabling them to invest in their farms, which was unthinkable until now. There are two pieces of good news in this respect, according to the Commission’s own report: positive prospects for the future mean that additional amounts of milk are required from the market, therefore a 2% increase is proposed for this year. I have been in agreement with this proposal from the start, Commissioner.
I have been in agreement with this proposal and I have tried to work alongside the rapporteur, Mrs Jeggle, precisely because it is clear that there was some reticence and that there were some members of the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development who did not think that this proposal from the Commission should be supported.
However, from my perspective and as I understand it, Parliament should not, as you said, be curbing those producers who decided to respond positively to the demands of the market. It was therefore I who proposed, in agreement with Mrs Jeggle, to make this measure voluntary.
As Mrs Jeggle has already said, the report was adopted unanimously in the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development. Although it is true, as the rapporteur said, that there is underusage of the quota at EU level, this underusage is by no means equally distributed between all the Member States, nor is the production deficit as against theoretical consumption.
Just consider that in my country, Spain, the production allocated to us is 6.1 million tonnes and our theoretical consumption is 9 million tonnes. Spain therefore has, it has to be said, almost the largest deficit per inhabitant per year in the whole of the European Union.
Therefore, in Mr Goepel’s report, we have asked for this adjustment of the quota to be done in future, not by means of a linear increase, as in the proposal that you are putting forward now, but rather based on the gap that exists between the current structure and the structure that the sector should have, as you say, in order to be competitive and face up to the market alone. In this respect, Commissioner, I would like to ask you whether you are considering the possibility, in relation to the adjustment mechanisms or soft landing
of designing individual models for each Member State.
I would like to make it very clear that I think that milk production should be preserved right across Europe. With regard to quotas, before saying that we are now going to abandon them and that they are going to disappear, we need to think about their socio-economic role of protecting many fragile economies. In many areas milk production is, as you know, the only agricultural option, therefore this system has helped..."@en1
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