Brussels, 27/03/2007 (Agence Europe) - On 23 March, the Commission drew up a positive balance sheet of actions for improving apiculture production and sales. The Commission does therefore not consider it necessary to amend the 2004 Regulation (797). It is committed only to introducing provisions to enable operators to change ongoing programmes, which have no budgetary impact. The report concludes that, “priority actions retained by this regulation, despite them being limited by a budgetary point of view”, demonstrated real qualitative value.
Many countries requested Community aid to fight other bee diseases other than varroasis. The commission, however, opposed this demand, explaining that the “system does not aim to create a health policy in the sector”.
Supply balance: the Commission report points out that the EU has a honey deficit and usually has to import about half of the honey consumed. Nevertheless, self-sufficiency has improved since EU enlargement to 25 member states. the three biggest honey producers in the EU are Spain, Germany and Hungary with, respectively, 32,000, 26,000 and 19,500 tonnes in 2004/05. Production in the 10 member states that joined in 2004 is around 43,000 t, 25% of total production of the EU. Poland and Hungary are the biggest producers among these countries.
The EU imports around 150,000 t of honey a year, especially from Argentina (71,000 t) and much less from Mexico (falling since 2000) and from Brazil. Community exports to third countries (6,000 t in 2005) mainly go to Switzerland (1,500 t).
The average import price has fallen sharply since 2003, from €2.31/kg to €1.29/kg. This price level is low but similar to that at the beginning of 2000 (before the ban on Chinese imports of honey). According to available figures for 2006, import price levels slightly went up (€1.34/kg).
The average Community honey export price has also been falling since 2004 but remains at a quite high level: €3.63/kg, which is mainly higher than that for imported honey. European honey is often of high quality and with specific desirable organoleptic qualities (monofloral honeys).
Census: according to data provided by member states, the total number of bee keepers in the Community is 593,000, 17,986 are considered as professionals (at least 150 bee hives). The total number of hives is 11.6 million, 4.3 million of which belong to professional beekeepers. 3% of beekeepers own around 40% of all hives.
Member states with the most hives are: Spain; Greece; France and Italy. In absolute value, professional beekeepers are concentrated in five member states: Greece; Spain; France; Italy and Hungary. In 2005 honey consumption was 0.7kg per head of the population - no significant increase over recent years. Greece is the EU country with the highest consumption (1.7kg/ per capita), followed by Austria, Germany and Spain.
Funded actions: In 2005 and 2006, the most widely used measure remained varroasis control (between 33% and 35%, amounting to over €8 million), followed by technical assistance (26% - almost €6 million), rationalisation of transhumance (19% - €4.5 million) honey analyses (8% - €1.8 million, restocking of hives (between 6% and 7% - €1.5 million) and finally applied research (5% or approximately €1 million).
The Commission notes a considerable decrease in funds allocated to varroasis control, given that a new measure was introduced in 2005, restocking of hives and a higher uptake for honey analyses. In an effort to enable Community honey to tackle international competition better, apiculture products are now eligible under the 2005 agricultural product promotion action on the internal market. In 2006, provisional expenditure under the member states' programmes came to 82.5% of the total planned expenditure; that is to say, approximately €19 million were spend out of a total of €23 million.