“As you have seen, there are farmers demonstrating once again in front of the walls of the Council. We have not forgotten them because during the last Council we were able to address all the issues relating to administrative simplification and we have already been able to conclude several steps forward in favor of simplification, today we have administrative measures that concern more income and we will approach the common agricultural policy in such a way as to be able to provide greater flexibility and therefore measures that will allow us to increase the income of our farmers”. This was stated by the Belgian Agriculture Minister (EU rotating presidency), David Clarinval, upon his arrival at the Agriculture Council.
“I hope that here too an agreement can be obtained to be able to continue the dialogue with the European Parliament in the last few weeks before the European elections. The objective is obviously to be able to guarantee good competitiveness for our agriculture and also food sovereignty at European level by providing fair remuneration for farmers”, he added.
In detail – he explained – “we will introduce greater flexibility in the measures concerning winter coverage or crop rotations, greater flexibility with less complexity. There is also a second package which consists in the establishment of a price observatory with price thresholds that would allow the responsiveness in the event of price reductions”. Added to this are the trade measures against Russian cereals.