EPP Agriculture ministers met today in Brussels to prepare the upcoming Agriculture and Fisheries Council. The meeting was co-chaired by Sari ESSAYAH, Finnish Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, and Konstantinos TSIARAS, Greek Minister of Agricultural Development and Food.
The ministers warmly welcomed Christophe HANSEN, the new Commissioner-designate for Agriculture and Food and Jessika ROSWALL, the new Commissioner-designate for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy.
The Ministers exchanged views on the main challenges their member states are facing and expressed their expectations towards the new European Commission.
They followed-up on their discussion of the EPP priorities for the future of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), finding consensus on 10 main priorities. The paper will be introduced to the newly sworn-in European Commissioners ahead of the next EU Agriculture and Fisheries Council meeting of 9 December in Brussels. The guiding principles include issues such as food quality, sovereignty and security, ensuring high standards of European agriculture, the importance of boosting competitiveness by promoting research and innovation, focus on development in the rural areas, simplification of the CAP implementation to ease the administrative burden faced by farmers, a decent income for farmers and fair operation of the food chain.
For more information contact:
Alexandra Henman
Deputy Spokesperson
+32 471 90 76 84
alh@epp.eu
Angelos Athanasopoulos
National and Regional Press Director
+32 471 90 76 35aa@epp.eu
The EPP Manifesto outlines the basic principles of the Party summarising who we are, what our values are, what challenges are we facing and what vision we have for the future. The Manifesto was developed in parallel to the EPP Platform document within the EPP Working Group 1 for “European Policy”.
The Party Platform was developed in EPP Working Group 1 for “European Policy” chaired by EPP President Wilfried MARTENS ?and EPP Vice President Peter HINTZE. The Working Group consists of delegates of EPP member parties who prepared and worked?on this document for more than two years and received input?from the drafting committee as well as senior and young experts. The document was adopted at the 2012 EPP Congress in Bucharest, thus replacing the Basic Programme of Athens from 1992.