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]
