Arno Bausemer, ESN Group MEP and member of the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development (AGRI), comments:
“Area-based payments are an essential part of our farmers’ income, regardless of their age. It is already a grave mistake that these payments are to be cut by around 80 billion euros in the next funding period. Our farmers are the key guarantors that we in Germany and Europe can produce high-quality, healthy food every single day. As a long-standing employee and later owner of our family’s meat-producing business in the Stendal district, I can confirm that area payments are vital to the survival of small and medium-sized farms in particular.
Many older farmers may have reached the statutory retirement age, but because their pensions are so low and they still have loans to repay, they simply cannot afford to stop working. Whatever their personal motivation for carrying on, it amounts to blatant discrimination when Brussels’ EU bureaucrats now want to deny these dedicated older people any access at all to area payments. Ursula von der Leyen is effectively declaring war on farmers in Germany and across Europe with these plans – and she must be stopped.
In the coming weeks and months, the ESN Group will table amendments to the Common Agricultural Policy to ensure that farmers can continue to receive full area payments even after reaching retirement age. We support the goal of reducing the average age of farmers in Europe from the current 58 years. This can be achieved by specifically promoting young farmers – for example through easier access to land, start-up aid for setting up farms or cutting red tape. However, the socialist-style central planning of the European Commission, which deliberately weakens older farmers, would not only put their life’s work at risk, it would do nothing to improve succession on farms. On the contrary: even more farms would disappear, valuable arable land would be left idle, covered with wind turbines or solar panels, or sold off to foreign financial speculators. From the perspective of the AfD delegation in the European Parliament, every farmer must remain free in future to decide for himself, without state interference, how long he wants to work.”
