Brussels – “Today, together with my group, I voted against the targeted reform of the Common Market Organisation (CMO) because the final text amounts to a real betrayal of farmers.” This was stated on the sidelines of the vote by the Green/EFA MEP, Cristina Guarda (Greens/EFA), rapporteur for the forthcoming CMO reform. “The aim,” she recalls, “was ambitious: to strengthen their position in the value chain so as to finally give them the power to protect their income through binding, robust, and transparent contracts, applicable also to members of cooperatives.” But “right-wing politicians have deliberately chosen not to fight for this” and “have preferred to sell off farmers’ dignity just to gain some meagre satisfaction in a culture war over the use of the word “burger” and meat designations,” she points out. “An ideological battle waged by the rapporteur with the active support of the right-wing parties for the sole purpose of sacrificing the sector’s genuine economic interests,” the MEP from the Green Left Alliance (AVS) emphasises once again.
“The result is a text that allows Member States to exempt entire sectors from the requirement for written contracts by citing “justified reasons” that are so vague as to render the entire reform meaningless. “This is an unacceptable exemption,” comments the MEP, “which affects the dairy sector in particular, a sector that has been under unsustainable pressure for months and which would have needed strict rules on price transparency and contractualisation to protect producers’ livelihoods.”
“The rapporteur and certain agricultural representatives have used producers’ rights as a smokescreen to fight ideological battles, ultimately harming the very people they claim to want to defend,” she continues. According to Guarda, “describing the position of producers in this text as ‘strengthened’ is an insult to reality; it is an empty label that masks the right’s inability to deliver concrete results for farm incomes.” For the Green MEP, “farmers are not protected by ideological banners or by propaganda about product names, but by real review clauses and transparency on value.” She concludes by pledging, “as rapporteur for the forthcoming CMO reform”, “to correct these distortions and to put concrete tools back at the centre, exposing those who prefer slogans to the economic survival of those who work the land.”
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
