Following a meeting in Warsaw on Monday, the agriculture ministers of the Eastern European and Baltic countries issued a joint statement declaring that maintaining the current level of funding available for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is vital to enabling the fulfilment of the European Union’s climate protection commitments. The Hungarian government will be doing everything possible to protect the agricultural funding due to Hungarian farmers. It is unacceptable that farmers, or the Hungarian people via food price increases, be made to pay the price of climate protection.

On 24 February, the agriculture ministers of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania issued a joint statement in support of maintaining the current level of the Common Agricultural Policy budget. “The CAP budget proposed by the European Commission must under all circumstances be increased, because that would not be enough even if the environmental and climate requirements being demanded of farmers were not increasing. We cannot ask more from farmers without providing additional resources, and certainly not while introducing a decrease in funding”, Minister of Agriculture István Nagy said following the ministerial meeting in Warsaw.

At the meeting, which was held with the participation of European Commissioner for Agriculture Janusz Wojciechowski, the ministers agreed that agriculture must also contribute to the realisation of the European Union’s environmental and climate protection targets. “It is clear that the contribution of agriculture must also be increased, but the correct balance must be found between the undertakings of agriculture and other sectors. The contents of the Green Deal must be realised in such a way that the price of climate protection is paid by the greatest polluters, and not the poorer EU member states, and in manner that ensures that climate protection does not result in a reduction in the competitiveness of European agriculture and an increase in the administrative burdens on farmers, and that most definitely does not result in a drastic increase in food prices”, the Hungarian Minister of Agriculture emphasised.

(MTI)