Janusz Wojciechowski, MEP, Poland
vice-chairman Committee of Agriculture and Rural Development
W have to save family farms
There are three fundamental questions which we have to put on the table debating about the future of the European agriculture
The first – Do we need agriculture in EU or do we not?
The second – assuming we do need agriculture - what should be its mission?
The third – what is our vision of the future of the agriculture?
The answer for the first question is obvious. We do need agriculture. We do need agriculture, but from just economical point of view only, we should liquidate it, because it is generally not competitive.
The competitiveness of the European agriculture is a kind of a myth.
Our agriculture is unable for the competition with Brazil, Argentina or Australia, because of factors like climate, geographical conditions, labor costs and many more.
Brazilian sugar, the Brazilian beef, the American corn or Chinese strawberries are always more competitive then similar European products.
The next problem is that the European farmers are obliged to implement high standards of its production, for example animal welfare standards, but nobody requires these standards from exporters from third countries. We have double standards in practice.
In conclusion - from economical point of view the European agriculture should be abandoned, but we look at our agriculture not only from economical point of view. The political approach and the social approach is also very important.
We need agriculture as a guarantee of our food supply safety. This is one of the three pillars of our general safety: physical safety which is ensured by the army and police, the energy supply safety which we try to ensure for Europe not respecting at all costs, an food supply safety – these are the fundamental pillars of our safety in general.
We have to save our agriculture as a pillar of our safety. I think that this idea is more and more clear now. This idea was expressed in the European Parliament position about the CAP health check.
OK. We agree we need agriculture in EU. There is the second question – what should be its mission?
Food supply safety is one challenge, the second is the conservation of rural areas, especially natural environment. Another function of agriculture is to stop migration from countryside to big cities.
And in last years we can observe a new agricultural function – bioenergy, which means participation of agriculture in process to ensure energy supply safety.
The question is how to keep these different goals in harmony? It is possible or not?
In my opinion it is possible. There is possible to ensure food supply for Europe, respecting environmental and social challenges. To achieve this objective is necessary to have reasonable vision of the future of the European agriculture.
What should the vision be?
At the first: we should forget the idea that the European agriculture can be competitive. This is “mission impossible”. We have to accept the fact that we have uncompetitive agriculture and we have to save it by the appropriate support.
Secondly we should accept that the European agriculture should be not too intensive and too industrial.
Farms of thousand and thousand of hectares, High density farms for ten or hundred thousands pigs, this is impossible to join with environmental friendliness.
This is the social problem too because the concentration and industrialization process in agriculture causes the liquidation of many small farms and forces the farmers to sell their land and move to the cities. We can observe the beginning of this process in Poland now. W have the expansion of high density pig farm now and we can observe very negative effect of this kind of farming for environment and for the situation of the small farmers having small pig farms. They are not able to compete with high density farms.
This is the reason that I am in favor of stronger support for the small family farms and less support for big industrial farms.
The EU agricultural policy should be orientated for the conservation of the small family farm which are able to ensure to supply food for half billion of European citizens and which are able to protect rural areas effectively.
