Brussels, 10/09/2015 (Agence Europe) - The conference of the presidents of the European Parliament's political groups decided on Thursday 10 September to accede to the request of the agriculture committee for a debate during the Brussels mini plenary session on the agricultural crisis. It will be held next week on Wednesday 16 September at around 8.00pm. There will be statements by the Council and the Commission (by Commissioner Phil Hogan) followed by a debate.
The €500 million aid package for EU dairy and meat farmers is a step in the right direction but it is not enough to offset the impact of the fall in prices and stabilise production, Czeslaw Adam Siekierski (EPP, Poland), who chairs the European Parliament's agriculture committee, said on Wednesday 9 September (see EUROPE 11383).
He called for further measures to be adopted, including, for example, an increase in intervention prices for dairy products. He believes aid should be paid out to farmers in the countries like Poland and Romania whose production has been hit by extreme drought.
Siekierski argued that member states must also use all the instruments made available to them while ensuring that EU competition rules are adhered to. “The Commission and the Council must act now to stabilise all agricultural markets”, he stated.
In his view, consideration has to be given to ways to stabilise agricultural markets in the long term. “We need a more responsive safety net and new market instruments that would help to tackle price volatility and market instability”, he said. He would like to use the upcoming review of the common agricultural policy (CAP), scheduled for 2016, to be used to discuss how to update and expand crisis-related market measures “on the basis of Parliament's proposals from the last CAP reform, which were, regrettably rejected by member states”. (Lionel Changeur)