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The Hungarian Chamber of Agriculture, together with seventy other European agricultural organizations, is organizing a demonstration in Brussels to defend the two-pillar Common Agricultural Policy. The farmers’ protest is being organized after the President of the European Commission failed to respond to an earlier request from farmers, Világgazdaság reports.
The accession of Ukraine to the European Union would add more than 40 million hectares of Ukrainian land to the 161 million hectares currently eligible for EU support, Zsolt Papp, President of the Hungarian Chamber of Agriculture, said at a press conference on Tuesday. The European Commission’s plans, on which they are reportedly unwilling to engage in a meaningful and open debate with interest groups, have prompted farmers to organize an EU-wide protest in Brussels.
“Ukraine would be entitled to a fifth of the EU’s total agricultural budget. That would mean a record amount of area aid and rural development funding for the country at the expense of other Member States,” Zsolt Papp stressed. He announced that
on May 20, together with some 70 European agricultural organizations, they will organize a protest in Brussels to defend the two-pillar Common Agricultural Policy.
At the event, Agriculture Minister István Nagy pointed out that “we have already experienced what it is like when Ukraine behaves as a member of the EU, and the free trade agreement has shown the dangers of this. The opening up of the EU has created market turmoil, and the influx of dubious quality Ukrainian grain has had ‘brutal’ consequences in the region.”
He noted that threats to the agricultural sector must be taken seriously, which is why the government has unilaterally banned imports of Ukrainian agricultural products. Although this has reduced market pressure, their accession could lead to an even worse situation than before, with development funds drying up, single farm payments being cut, and Ukrainian produce flooding the EU market.
István Jakab, President of the Association of Hungarian Farmers’ Cooperatives (Magosz), said that farming in the neighboring country is carried out under completely different conditions and there are differences in scale compared to EU agriculture. Ukraine’s arable land is almost a third of that of all EU Member States combined, and alone produces almost half of the EU’s cereal production, he explained. At the same time, they do not have to meet the strict production conditions here, meaning their activities are not controlled by the EU, he added.
The Hungarian Chamber of Agriculture, together with Magosz, also prepared a study on the negative effects on Hungarian and EU agriculture of implementing the so-called Strategic Dialogue, commissioned by the European Commission.
The proposal would abolish area-based payments across the board and reserve them only for a narrow group of farmers.
According to the study, one of the aims of the restructuring of the support system is precisely to prepare the ground for this. They say that the Ukrainian areas would add 40 million hectares to the current 157 million hectares eligible for aid.
After months of agricultural protests last year, the European Commission made several promises to farmers, but so far these do not seem to have materialized. Copa-Cogeca, the European Union’s largest agricultural organization defending farmers’ interests, has sent an open letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sounding the alarm about proposals to dismantle the two-pillar structure of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). They see a historic blunder in the making, which they want to prevent.
Via Világgazdaság, MTI; Featured image: Pixabay