Speeches

Mr President, Madam President, Prime Minister, ladies and gentlemen, by acceding to the European Union all Member States – including Poland – accepted a set of principles and values, including the primacy of Community law and respect for the rule of law and individual rights and freedoms. Since then, membership of our Union has allowed all Member States, including Poland, to benefit from a number of advantages, including the receipt of European funds. What you and your party have been trying to do for too long is to get away from compromises and continue to enjoy the benefits. Benefits which, by the way, I have not heard you enumerate in your speech, Mr Prime Minister. I advise you to call your former partner, David Cameron, who got on a train: the train of populism and blackmail. The same one you're going up to right now. And I also advise you, when you talk to him, to tell him the unfortunate consequences of not being able and not knowing how to get off that train to your country in time. And you're still in time to get off that train to Poland. And do it before it's too late, because you know what the last stop is. Madam President, after what we have heard today, I can tell you little else. Quite simply, if the Commission does not act now... (the Chair took the floor from the speaker).

Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, achieving the environmental sustainability of the food system is vital for the future of our societies, but it is also vital to do so without taking the economic sustainability of our primary sector forward, it is also vital to do so by achieving these environmental objectives without provoking a social revolution among European farmers. I therefore, like many other honourable Members, urge the European Commission, when quantifying targets, to do so on the basis of impact studies; to begin with, you could hear, read the report - which the Commission itself has had hidden in a drawer for six months - which indeed confirms to us that this Farm to Fork Strategy is going to greatly harm the economic sustainability of Europe's primary sector. In that regard, I wanted to ask the Commissioner a question: the future legislative proposals that the Farm to Fork Strategy may bring about in the coming months and years, will the Commission bring them only in political terms or will it bring them in on the basis of impact studies and scientific data, and also by listening to European farmers?