`Olive Regions Work on Joint Strategy to Maintain EU Subsidies - Olive Oil Times

Olive Regions Work on Joint Strategy to Maintain EU Subsidies

By Julie Butler
Apr. 2, 2012 09:59 UTC

A new olive oil lobby group is urgently prepar­ing a posi­tion paper to pro­tect its mem­bers from threa­t­ended sub­sidy cuts by the European Commission.

At its meet­ing in Barcelona on last Tuesday, the Forum of European Olive Regions agreed to com­plete the so-called white paper before the end of June in order to defend itself in Brussels” as nego­ti­a­tions heat up over the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) struc­ture and bud­get for 2014 – 2020.

Among changes pro­posed by the EC is pay­ing all olive farm­ers a flat rate per hectare rather than pay­ing some accord­ing to pro­duc­tion his­tory – a change which would see France and Spain lose the most.

Spain’s olive oil sec­tor alone is cur­rently sub­sidised to the tune of 40 per­cent of the value of the olive oil mar­ket, accord­ing to Spain’s new Minister for Agriculture, Food and Environmental Affairs, Miguel Arias Cañete. We’re talk­ing about…aid that rep­re­sents 1 bil­lion euros ($1.3b) and that amounts to in the order of €468 per hectare (per year),” he told Spain’s Parliament last month.


Miguel Arias Cañete

Forum rep­re­sents regions in Spain, Italy, France, Greece, and Croatia

Speaking after attend­ing the meet­ing of the new forum, Director General of Industry and Agri-Food Quality for the Andalusian regional gov­ern­ment , Ana Romero, told Olive Oil Times the group had to move quickly.

Asked why a new forum was nec­es­sary when orga­ni­za­tions such as the International Olive Council (IOC), and national and regional gov­ern­ments, already rep­re­sented the sec­tor, she said while the IOC, for instance, did mag­nif­i­cent work, there was much at stake for the mem­ber regions and they were bet­ter posi­tioned to lobby directly them­selves.

In response to crit­i­cism that the CAP pay­ments prop up olive farms oth­er­wise not finan­cially viable, Romero said that there were many rea­sons to jus­tify sub­si­dies. Among these were the impor­tance of the olive oil sec­tor in main­tain­ing rural com­mu­ni­ties and pre­vent­ing land aban­don­ment, par­tic­u­larly in areas of Spain where the land was sloped and very dif­fi­cult to farm prof­itably yet the olive oil pro­duced was excep­tional.

She said the posi­tion paper, which would be released for dicus­sion in the sec­tor, would set out nec­es­sary changes under five main head­ings: qual­ity, pro­mo­tion and infor­ma­tion, trade and agree­ments with non-EU coun­tries, research, and the CAP reform.

The devel­op­ment of these sec­tions would be split between the forum’s mem­bers, which are Dubrovnik-Neretva and Istria (Croatia), Andalusia and Catalonia (Spain), Corsica, Langedoc-Roussillon, Provence-Cote d’Azur-Alpes and Rhone-Alpes (France), Crete and Sterea Ellada (Greece), and Emilia Romagna, Puglia and Tuscany (Italy).

Representatives of the Assembly of the European Regions pro­duc­ing Fruit, Vegetables and Plants (AREFLH) and the European Association of Geographical Indications (AREPO) are lend­ing their sup­port to the new forum and also attended the meet­ing.



Advertisement
Advertisement

Related Articles