Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-09-17-Speech-4-012"
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"en.20090917.2.4-012"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, for months now livestock farmers have been warning the Commission and the Council of the gravity of the crisis. Tens of thousands of jobs have been destroyed in rural areas. The European Union had counted on growth in world demand. Its experts got it very wrong. The financial and economic crisis that we are experiencing has direct effects on agriculture and consumption.
The decision by Mrs Boel, Commissioner for Agriculture, to maintain the increase in quotas and the Council’s wish to dismantle them by 2015 are a provocation to milk producers. Times have changed. European policy must be adjusted to suit a new global environment. The milk prices imposed on producers do not cover production costs. On each litre of milk, some small farmers are losing up to 30 cents. At the end of the year, many of them will not have made a single euro, or will even have lost money. Some of them, too, as we are told by regional officials, are today going so far as to take their own lives.
In the face of this unprecedented crisis, the European Union must take significant steps, quickly. We call upon the Heads of State or Government who are meeting this evening to prepare for the G20 to place the issue of the dairy crisis on the agenda for their meeting, so that appropriate steps can be taken to respond to livestock farmers.
The European Union must boost the negotiation capacities of dairy farms, so that they are no longer subject to the dictates of the agri-food industry. It should also put in place a safety net to guarantee a remunerative price so that the price never falls below the production costs. The European Union must put a stop to its export refunds programme. It has just committed the enormous sum of EUR 480 million, adopted with the backing of various parliamentary groups from both the right and the left, in order to sell its surpluses cheaply on the world markets. It is destroying hundreds of thousands of farming jobs in the south and is cynically pushing farmers to move off the land or to immigrate.
Above all, the European Union must immediately make drastic reductions, of 5%, in European milk quotas, in a way that is inversely proportional to the volume delivered by small producers, in order to swiftly re-establish a balance between supply and demand. A laisser-faire policy is unacceptable. It has terrible consequences in terms of employment and land use patterns.
Without the small farmers, there will be no Europe."@en1
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