12
Mar
2024
Watch
Council and Commission statements - Preparation of the European Council meeting of 21 and 22 March 2024 (debate)
Mr President, the Minister representing the Presidency of the Council told us earlier that it was essential to increase farmers’ wages and simplify administrative burdens. But the European Union cannot constantly play firefighters. Today, we have farmers, most of whom are not employees. They are independent. They just want to be able to live decently from the fruits of their work and feed our countries, our peoples and our continent. You are constantly imposing increasingly demanding standards on them, standards that are not environmental standards, but are in reality standards under environmental pretexts, without any real impact on the environment – for the most part – or on food safety. Mr Weber is very proud to tell us that his Group, the EPP, voted 32 of the 34 texts of the Green Deal. But this is the tragedy of agriculture and farmers today. This explains their perfectly legitimate anger. The record of Mrs von der Leyen, who has just left this Chamber, is there. We are imposing taxes with our own resources, increasingly demanding standards, which are slowly making our farmers die, as we made our industry die yesterday. The European Union cannot be the most regulated, constrained and least protected economic area in the world. This model is not viable, it needs to be changed; we need to reduce taxes, burdens and constraints within the European market and be able to protect ourselves, like all major powers in the world.