Thursday, September 12, 2019

Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, September 10, 2019, Food and Agriculture

Birgit Malsack-Winkemann
Food and Agriculture
German Bundestag, September 10, 2019, Plenarprotokoll 19/110, pp. 13601-13602

[Birgit Malsack-Winkemann is an Alternative für Deutschland Bundestag member from Berlin where she has served for over two decades as a magistrate. She here responds to the proposed 2020 budget for the Food and Agriculture Ministry currently led by Julia Klöckner (CDU).]

Honorable president. Worthy colleagues.

New food and agriculture budget, old problems. The bottom line is that the promotion of agriculture is essentially the result of EU farm subsidies – approximately 58 billion euros for the EU states each year, almost 40 percent of the EU budget.

From the federal government in 2020 comes 965 million euros for the community expenditure “Improvement of Farm Infrastructure and Coastal Protection”, including 200 million euros for the special area plan “Promotion of Rural Development”.

Who receives the money? How sustainable is German agriculture? Researchers illuminate the system for the Bundestag…The result is depressing: Massive sustainability deficits at all levels. Experts judge that the ecological sustainability has even become worse, as was to be read in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of July 12, 2019. With the increased use of agricultural chemicals, the species variety declines and the dependence on imported feeds increases. Intensive forms of animal husbandry without outflow increase and ever more frequently will livestock be one-sidedly culled for high performance. A unique catastrophe! Is that the result of more than a decade of the CDU’s supposedly fabulous ecological agriculture policy, Frau Klöckner? And there is more, since the social and economic consequences correspond to the ecological disaster. Agriculture, like almost all other key sectors, shows large-scale loss of employment: During 2012 to 2017 alone, cattle raising declined 18 percent, dairy 28 percent, and swine raising between 2007 and 2016 by one-half. Many farmers complain of financial pressure, and many wish to re-direct but lack the means. Consumers in Germany want healthy, ecological food yet farmers find no help for conversion of their farm [Höf] to a bio-farm.

            Artur Auernhammer (CDU/CSU): Oh, God!

Germany is far behind other European countries in ecological rural construction. You have aimed at 20 percent by 2020. And where are you, Frau Minister? Between a ridiculous 7 and 9 percent. And what do you do, Frau Klöckner? You indeed promise you will seek payments from Europe for environmental affairs and assert that you promote small and mid-sized operations [Betriebe] with the so-called redistribution premium. Yet in truth you promote – directly with your system of redistribution premiums – industrial lobbies and thereby the continued death of farming.

Since the first 46 acres of an operation are more strongly supported than the next, the redistribution premium with all the palaver and print comes to 2,000 euros a year. With the ridiculous sum of 2,000 euros a year you evidently maintain not one, single job. Germany can do more here. The EU regulations permit the redistribution of up to 30 percent of the EU’s direct payments to small operations. That is what we require, the AfD, the only Alternative for Germany.

            Gerd Clemens Hocker (FDP): Not for agriculture!

Actually, it is only 7 percent, Frau Minister, and that is your responsibility.

You thus defend Germany’s big business with your ridiculous 2,000 euro redistribution premium. Since at the agriculture ministries’ conference at the end of April, beginning of May, in Brussels it was agreed that any member state which distributed some money for the first hectare need not fear a capping of payments at 100,000 euros. You, Frau Minister, know quite precisely that a fifth of farm land in Germany belongs to only 1 percent of the operations, 80 percent of the money going to only 20 percent. Thus Südzucker [world’s largest sugar producer], with a profit of 300 million euros in the last two fiscal years, cashed in 2016 a subvention sum of 1.82 million euros. And you, Frau Klöckner, epitomize this utterly decrepit system and its unbearable bureaucracy with your ridiculous redistribution premium and even now permit  yourself to celebrate this patent scandal which is ruining our farmers.

The principle “More money for more surface area” destroys all. Across Europe, it is leading the small farmer to give up his farm. With the false agricultural policy, between 2005 and 2016 alone were almost 30 percent of all operations quasi-publicly eliminated. It cannot thus go on, Frau Minister. How about respecting the employment figure of an operation or ecological animal husbandry and protection and the re-foresting of the drought-damaged woods of our native land, instead of further de-foresting the woods for inefficient windmills destined for the toxic waste dump?

That is what we require, the AfD, the only Alternative for Germany.

Instead you promote a kind of not to be excelled industrial-lobby big business when you require that an operation may maintain only two large animal units per hectare of surface area, that is two cows or 20 sheep. In the rural economy, the fertilizer and seed manufacturers, the feed industry and before all the marketing firms are doing fine, only not our German farmers.

Our farmers on account of an ever greater tax burden daily struggle for their survival. But with industrial lobbyism,  garnished with poisoned sugar bits like the redistribution premium, life is much easier, isn’t it, Frau Klöckner? It is precisely this policy which will secure the defeat of your party at the ballot box and for that you can thank the future people’s party, the only Alternative for Germany, the AfD.

Thank you kindly.


[Translated by Todd Martin]