On Sunday 12 April, Didier Guillaume, the French Minister of Agriculture, called on the European Union, to take “extremely urgent” action to allow milk to be put in storage as a response to the surpluses caused by the coronavirus crisis.
“Throwing milk away is out of the question. (...) I am asking the European Union to change position and make very important decisions. I will not give up”, said Guillaume. He asked Janusz Wojciechowski, the Commissioner for Agriculture, to authorise market support and to allow milk to be stored. The minister also called on the EU to allow PDO cheese to be frozen, action that is currently prohibited.
Crisis distillation measures for wine. MEPs Éric Andrieu (S&D, France), Irène Tolleret (Renew Europe, France) and Juan Ignacio Zoido (EPP, Spain) called on the European Commission to release crisis distillation aid for wine.
Andrieu wants the EU to make a financial commitment to purchase ethanol produced from distilling the hundreds of millions of litres of wine currently stuck in wine producers’ tanks. The idea would be to allow European wine producers to distil their PDO wine to transform it into ethanol. This pure alcohol could then be resold to industrialists, particularly for the manufacture of hydroalcoholic gel.
Changes in legislation. Tolleret and Zoido will be sending a letter to Commissioner Wojciechowski this week, signed by other MEPs, calling for exceptional measures under the Common Market Organisation (CMO) support scheme, including voluntary crisis distillation for all categories of wine, aid for ‘green harvesting’, support for private storage, grubbing-up of vines, and promotional measures.
They also call for relaxation of European legislation on promotion, labelling, monitoring and sanctions, planting (and replanting) permits, and the management of national wine programmes. They also suggest that unused funds from current programmes could be transferred to the next budget year. The two MEPs are also asking for a compensation fund to be set up for the sector to help producers cope with this crisis, which comes on top of the problems caused by the US sanctions imposed in October 2019 as part of the Airbus affair. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)