Dacian Cioloş outlines major issues of EU agriculture

The issues of food safety and a joint agricultural policy in the EU remain unresolved and are therefore important topics for debate among experts.

At the Congress of the European People’s Party in Marseille, the European Commissioner for Agriculture, Dacian Cioloş, outlined the major issues that his department is faced with, the most important of them being the lack of profit that agricultural activities bring farmers.

The EU Commissioner stated that, while food prices were rising, farmers’ income was about 40 percent lower than the average income of any economic sector in the EU.

“The issue lies mainly with the distribution of the value added along the food network, from the producer, processor, distributor and retailer all the way to the consumer. The first thing that needs to be dealt with here is that of organizing the agricultural producers and their power to negotiate within the food network. On the other hand, the farmers’ income is lower because production costs have risen faster than food prices in the last few years”, the EU commissioner stated.

“The farmers’ income is therefore under a double amount of pressure and that is what we are trying to compensate for by means of the Common Agricultural Policy, for, if we lack agricultural production as a basis, the food network will lose income and we risk facing the impossibility to ensure food safety, not for lack of technology, but because farmers are no longer encouraged to do their activities”, Dacian Cioloş added.

Agriculture is being conducted by elderly people

A classification by age of the EU citizens currently working in agriculture yields a shocking image.

“We need to come up with tools to ensure a certain amount of medium-term stability and predictability of the farmers’ income, as no young person will invest in agriculture unless they have some minimal income predictability, given that investments in agriculture need to be long-term”, the EU commissioner added.

“Thus, by means of direct payments to farmers, by these market mechanisms, by augmenting farmer’s power to negotiate and supporting their efforts to organize, we must give them perspective and stability”, the EU commissioner said.

On the other hand, according to Dacian Cioloş, specific measures need to be taken to support young farmers when they set on an enterprise.

“There are some grants which we still confer, settlement grants; they are given out through the Rural Development Programme, which can take the form of a direct payment to the young farmer or can be used to cover part of the credit costs at the bank; I have recently proposed an additional feature, namely that the direct payments to young farmers should be 25 percent higher than a direct medium payment at least during the first five years”, the EU commissioner pointed out.

But it is important that these measures should be implemented in all EU countries, as there are certain measures currently applicable to young farmers, but their inclusion in agricultural programmes is optional for each member state.

Translated by: Roxana-Andreea Dragu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University