Brussels – “Maintaining the efforts to support quality is the only we have to keep our leading role in the export of agricultural products,” said the Commissioner of the Union for Agriculture and Rural Development, Phil Hogan, in this exclusive interview to EUNEWS, in which he explained his strategy for supporting the sector – composed of defence and promotion of quality, opening to new foreign markets, support to little farmers and simplification of bureaucracy.
EUNEWS You are leaving for a mission in South East Asia in the following weeks, looking for new markets for European products. Is this a new “agricultural diplomacy”?
HOGAN “Last year I visited several countries to open their markets to high-quality European products. I travelled in Colombia, Mexico, China, Japan. I’ll be travelling to Vietnam and Indonesia in a couple of weeks together with 45 companies, and they all wants these new opportunities to be seized.
This strategy proved itself successful in China with pork meat, which recorded a significant increase in the export from the EU, and its prices are now increasing, European exporters are returning to viability.
A true diplomatic offensive that we are continuing to implement for supporting our agriculture, on which we are investing €150 million next year, up to €200 in three years, in order to support the financing of commercial missions, allowing companies to travel the world and finding new markets for their products.”
E. You’ve recently visited again Italy, where you are well known. What kind of reality did you find?
H. “A couple of weeks ago I made a very interesting trip in Italy, participating to a successful workshop together with MEP Nicola Caputo. I met all Italian stakeholders of the agricultural and food sectors: Italy is among the most important countries in Europe to adopt the model of IGT (Protected Geographical Indication) products, and the work we’d made to support them transformed several regions, allowing this characteristic to be greatly exploited.
We are committed in promoting IGTs in order to support the wellbeing of the Mediterranean Region and its unique high-level production. We, as Commission, wish to keep up with focusing on quality, supporting it worldwide and continuing to finance it generously in the future.
E. Still, European agriculture hasn’t experienced a great time lately…
H. “In the last two years, European agriculture has been significantly hit by the embargo decided by Russia, by the decrease of imports from China, by the overproduction of milk and pork meat. We introduced additional financing amounting to €1.5 billion to support the sector and help its recovery. We now have to double our efforts and work on trade, finding new markets to increase the demand of high-quality products. We’ve found the way to support milk producers with €150 million, in order to be able to increase prices – it is unacceptable in fact for farmers to produce at loss, they need to get back to profitability.”
E. One of the problems that farmers lament, especially the littlest ones, is the complexity of norms regulating the sector, which makes it difficult to be open to the market. What are you doing about this?
H. “We’ve introduced several simplifications. We implemented 30 initiatives to help simplify bureaucracy in order to help farmers, we reduced fines and we introduced the proportional criterion for mistakes made. We want to help the littlest farmers, supporting them and relieving them from their fears of not being admitted to funding schemes.
I asked all national payment agencies to adopt the Italian position, which establishes an initial check of all applications for funding, in order to reduce mistakes in filling the forms as much as possible. This should help farmers to reduce their fear of asking for help because they are little.
We are now going to introduce other measures to support entrepreneurs to manage market volatility, in order to reach a stabilization of earnings and to be able to face particular crises of the sector. We will keep up with the simplification path – for a post-2020 agenda as well.
