EU farmers organisation has been left feeling unrepresented by the EU Agricultural Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski after he posted a series of tweets criticising industrial farming and they are set to hash out their differences in a meeting later this week.
Commissioner Wojciechowski sparked intense debate among the bloc’s farming community with a series of tweets posted earlier this week in which he appeared to express a preference against intensive and industrial farming of livestock.
“Everyone has the right to defend the intensive/industrial methods of animal husbandry, but one can’t say that in this way he/she defends the rural areas and farmers. Large-scale breeding is not done by farmers and these methods are not used by farmers,” read one of the tweets.
Europe’s transport decarbonisation has never been an easy task. Transport is responsible for as much as 27% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the EU and the European Commission admits that by 2030 things will not change dramatically.
Several pieces of legislation, such as the Renewable Energy Directive (RED), have attempted to change things, but without remarkable results.
The problem, as we all know, will not be fixed if one ignores reality. And if one disregards it on purpose, things will only deteriorate.
As an indication of the progress we have made, the Commission says, citing Eurostat, that renewables in the transport sector represented 8.9% in 2019.
Key EU officials presented today (19 April) a multilingual digital platform for the Conference on the Future of Europe, a massive event that will be launched officially on Europe Day (or should we say Saint Schuman Day) on 9 May.
The idea is to invite – and give a tool to – all EU citizens to contribute to shaping their own future and that of Europe as a whole.
It’s not a bad idea. It’s time the EU citizens’ voice also played a role when considering what kind of a Union we want. In the past, this was the prerogative of EU leaders, and of a select group of “wise men” (and women).
The rapid EU-wide loss of family and small-scale farms is in part due to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the EU’s agricultural Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski has said, pointing to the policy’s “errors and mistakes”.
Speaking during a recent AGRI-PETI joint committee meeting in the European Parliament, the Commissioner pointed out that between 2005 and 2014, as many as 4 million farms have disappeared in the EU, many of which were small farms.
“They were vanishing to the tune of a thousand a day,” Wojciechowski said, citing the example of his home country of Poland, which according to the latest agricultural census released this month has lost 190,000 of its farms, or 13%, in the past 10 years.
This week, MEPs debated a citizens’ initiative to ban the use of caged farming in the EU.
The public hearing was organised jointly by the European Parliament’s Agriculture and Petitions Committees on the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) ‘End the Cage Age’, which has been welcomed and supported by Agriculture Committee chair Norbert Lins.
“Animal welfare can be improved in the EU,” he said.
“It is of utmost importance that before planning any radical shift [to fully cage-free housing], we need to analyse the cost of such a change [and] think about providing sufficient financial support, compensation or other incentives to the farmers.”