Brussels, 15/04/2002 (Agence Europe) - It is unthinkable that "the agricultural policy as it stands, with its outdated mechanisms, can face both demands that are the expression of very different development processes (…) our friends of Hungary, Poland and Slovenia have demonstrated to us what for us was possibly only intuition: by transferring the same policies home, with more or less long and justified deadlines, we are taking the breath out of the farmers of the 15 and we risk smothering those of the 10 in the cradle". This is what, according to the Coldiretti, Padolo Bedoni, the president of this Italian farming organisation, stated, drawing the conclusions of the seminar organised in Brussels last week on "EU enlargement: a new model of integration between agricultural and food systems" (See the programme in Europe of 3 April, p.18). Mr. Bedoni accused of myopia those who believe they can "have these countries enter the Cap without having at least defined (…) the modalities (..), the specific nature and deadlines for the reform of the Cap". "We want both enlargement and the reform of the Cap", he went on to explain.
As for Istvan Jakab, president of the Association of Hungarian Farmers, he declared that Hungary could not agree to a ten-year transition period for implementing the Cap, whereas Wladyslav Serafin, President of the Organisation of Polish Farmers, stressed that Poland was a "leader in farming" (he especially recalled that, in an enlarged Union, it would be the second largest producer of potatoes, the third for wheat, fourth for pigs and sixth for milk). Slovenia cannot agree to the European Commission's proposals concerning the agricultural aspects of enlargement, said for his part Kuhar Ervin, director of the Chamber of Slovenian Agriculture.
According to the same press release, Corrado Pirzio Biroli, Chef de Cabinet for the Commissioner for agriculture, Franz Fischler, acknowledged the need to safeguard the income of farmers in an enlarged Union, where the number of farms will increase by 75%, whereas the average size of these farms will go from 19 to 7 hectares. The Commission, he also said, places emphasis on the efforts that the future Member States must make, especially concerning food safety, and rejects the extreme positions of these countries that want to abolish the Cap and those who want equal treatment immediately.