Brussels, 12/04/2012 (Agence Europe) - European Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Ciolos has said he wants an “active policy at EU level” to support young farmers. He was speaking on Thursday 12 April at a conference in the European Parliament organised by the European Council of Young Farmers (CEJA). He also defended his proposal for a compulsory aid scheme for young farmers.
He began by recalling that, from the start, he had wanted to make “Young Farmers” central to the post-2013 reform of the common agricultural policy (CAP). “If agriculture does not provide future prospects to young farmers, one might wonder what kind of future European agriculture has”, he stated. He acknowledged that taking over a farm is a particularly difficult period, requiring not only increasingly technical expertise on the part of the young people, but also a large financial capacity. “This capacity for investment is clearly a limiting factor for many young people, particularly in zones where access to farmland is increasingly difficult”, Ciolos argued. Despite the tools currently available under the CAP, “we've lost almost 3 million farmers over the last ten years”.
It is, therefore, important to step up a gear and put a proactive policy in place at European level to support the arrival of new farmers in the agricultural sector, allowing them either to create new businesses or take over a business - that is to say, a farm - whose owners have retired.
The Commission says that, in order to do this, financial support, with an installation subsidy, must be provided and access to bank loans has to be made easier. Ciolos proposed that member states should put in place, within their rural development programmes, a sub-programme specifically for young farmers. This would allow more focused support to be provided through, for example, co-financing specifically for young people, thus supporting young people in their investments and also supporting the training of young people.
As well as expanding measures for young people within rural development programmes, the Commission has proposed that, in the first years after installation at a farm, there is an increase in the level of direct payments during the first five years of activity for young farmers who set themselves up in business and ask for this help. “I sometimes hear that this measure should be voluntary for member states. But the political aim of this measure would be severely weakened if it is not obligatory for all member states”, the commissioner reasoned, referring to the statements from a number of EU countries calling for this aid for young farmers to form part of the first pillar of the CAP (direct aid and market expenditure). He made the point: “All young people must be able to benefit from these specific measures all over Europe. Making this an optional measure within the first pillar would be a way of accepting that there is discrimination among young famers in the EU, according to the criteria of their nationality, and according to where in Europe they set up their farm.” If the agricultural policy is to remain collective, the policy supporting installation of young people must also be collective, the commissioner argued.
Further organisational CAP measures, measures to manage the crisis, improve promotion for agricultural produce, and research and innovation will, Ciolos hopes, “encourage young people to invest time and resources in the agricultural sector”. (LC/transl.rt)