“The European Commission – citing the fact that it wishes to simplify the funding system – has proposed amendments which include some extremely cleverly smuggled in points that are totally unacceptable and violate our national interests”, Minister of Agriculture Sándor Fazekas said in Warsaw at a summit of Visegrád Group (V4) agriculture ministers and their Bulgarian, Slovenian and Romanian counterparts.

“The European Commission is preparing for an unprecedented attack that will be detrimental to farmers. The Brussels bureaucrats want to solve the situation that has arisen because of the migration crisis, which is totally independent of farmers, out of farmers’ money and at the expense of the Common Agricultural Policy”, the Minister declared.

“The review of the four-year programming period is currently underway, or to use a sports expression we are at halftime, and it is clearly visible that the European Commission is preparing for a cunning blitz attack”, he added. “They want to solve the migration crisis by reducing EU funding for farmers and reallocating subsidies, which we cannot allow; we must protect Hungarian farmers!”, Mr. Fazekas stressed.

At the proposal of the Hungarian minister, the V4 is calling for solidarity to enable the protection of the agricultural funding that we have worked hard to acquire and which is essential to the survival and financial stability of farmers living in the Central European region. “If the Brussels bureaucracy wants to perform new tasks using the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), we can only allow that via the allocation of a suitable level of added funding. The handling of the migration crisis cannot occur to the detriment of agricultural funding”, the Minister of Agriculture emphasised.

The goal of today’s meeting in Poland is for the Ministers participating in the summit to act in unison to increase public awareness of Brussels’ plans and to act jointly to successfully get Brussels to review its standpoint on this issue and withdraw its proposal, with which it would like to reduce the level of agricultural subsidies.

(Ministry of Agriculture Press Office)