The 11th edition of the European Farmers’ Congress took place in Bucharest from 23 to 25 October, a meeting point where around 400 participants and speakers tried to make proposals for a more sustainable and competitive future in the sector for the next European legislature, addressing the development of synergies so that all the representative sectors – agriculture, livestock and farming – can support their competencies in the face of the challenges facing the farming community.
The Congress, organised by COPA COGECA, with the support of the Romanian Alliance for Agriculture and Cooperation (AAC), reinforced the strength of the sector, and served as a platform for new ideas to steer the new political legislature in the EU.
Economic, climatic and social challenges were identified, as well as geopolitical instability, recent extreme weather events, unfair competition, high input costs, lack of fair remuneration for farmers and an increasing administrative burden.
Institutional opening ceremony
The opening ceremony was attended by the current President of the Hungarian Agriculture and Fisheries Council and Minister of Agriculture, István Nagy, and the Romanian Minister of Agriculture, Florin-Ionuț Barbu, who stressed the urgent need for European governments to ‘join forces and get involved to offer a viable future’ for the sector, so that ‘it becomes competitive, enjoys a good capacity for recovery and in which the interests of farmers and livestock farmers are at the very heart of agricultural policies’.
For his part, COGECA President Lennart Nilsson said that the days of the congress had helped to generate ‘exciting discussions covering strategic issues such as fostering cooperation, boosting innovation, embracing the bio-economy and creating a well-funded Water Resilience Initiative’, He went on to value ‘the contributions of COPA and COGECA members on these issues, which have been and are essential in order to forge our own vision of the future of EU agriculture, anchored in the reality on the ground’.
Another of the highlights of the meeting revolved around the framework for the governance of agri-food and rural policies at EU level, on which the representatives of the main bodies and institutions present at the Congress agreed that predictability must be guaranteed, unnecessary administrative burdens must be limited and provision must be made for exhaustive impact assessments to be carried out.
During the closing of the event, COPA President Massimiliano Giansanti reflected on the main aspects discussed, and considered that ‘as farmers and livestock farmers have taken to the streets to demonstrate in recent months, it has become clear how vulnerable our community is to the cumulative effects of policies, market conditions and geopolitical events’.
‘It is paramount that the EU institutions regain the confidence of agricultural producers and this requires coherent action. Thus, to demonstrate the interest of these institutions, the CAP must be given a larger budget specifically for the period after 2027, with more coherence in the trade sphere, which, incidentally, means avoiding any progress on the agreement with Mercosur in its current format. Also, as far as the food supply chain is concerned, actions are needed to increase ‘farmers remuneration,’ he said.
For Giansanti, European agricultural institutions are and must be at the heart of a new competitiveness agreement at the heart of the European project, ‘guaranteeing fair incomes as well as productivity and innovation as we move towards a green transition’.
