Difference between revisions of "Call for a new European Common Agricultural Policy"

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Latest revision as of 14:00, 18 October 2019

PAC1.jpg

May 23 2019

Eurosceptic or not, what you’ll find in your plate all year long is drastically determined by the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). This essential text is amended every 7 years (next edition being in 2021) and the 2019 European Parliament elections would have a tremendous impact on it.

Did you know that each citizen of the European Union (EU), like yourself maybe, gave more than 100€ per year those last 20 years, to subsidies all kinds of farmers across the EU? It makes a total of more than 50 000 000 000€ per year!

Sounds great, but how come the wealthiest farms are the one who benefit the most from our help? Sounds absurd when the french ministry of agriculture admits that 1 farmer commits suicide every 2 days in France, as the production price of certain products became higher than the sales price. This results from the odd idea to distribute 75% of subsidies according to farms surfaces, with no consideration for the amount & quality of food actually farmed, nor the evaluation of the owners wealth. That’s how the Duchy of Lancaster, private estate of Queen Elizabeth II, got 644 000€ from CAP in 2015.

Thanks to Brexit, this won’t happen anymore, but something worse will happen: as British farmers will loose their subsidies, the already decreasing CAP fund will loose UK’s participation to this common effort, and it could fall under 35% of the EU’s total yearly budget[1]; when farmers need more help than ever to shift towards resilient methods that could overcome climate change & the biodiversity crisis[2].

UK & Netherland citizens,
Vote for a resilient European agriculture!
Vote for the re-negotiation of our Common Agricultural Policy!

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Notes

  1. It was over 50% before 2004
  2. Only 25% of CAP fund is exclusively allowed to resilient practices