The president of the Junta de Extremadura, Guillermo Fernández Vara, defended this Tuesday that the Strategic Plan of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 2023-2027 “unquestionably brings, in the context of European, Spanish and extreme politics, a good response”, facing to the changes that are taking place globally due to climate change and the energy crisis.
All this, together with the new ERDF Operational Program, with an additional 592 million euros for Extremadura for structural policies and the European Social Fund, is “a safety cushion” for the next few years, assured Fernández Vara.
But he warned that this should not be the only goal, but rather that the challenge for this region and for society as a whole, including the agricultural sector, lies in “being well above what that cushion offers us. safety, which is just a starting position ”.
Thus expressed the head of the Regional Executive in Mérida during his speech at the New PAC Forum in Extremadura 2023-2027, organized by the Ministry of Agriculture, Rural Development, Population and Territory of the Junta de Extremadura, and where he stressed that ” hopes ”that the new Common Agricultural Policy will be applied“ definitively ”from October 2023.
During his speech, Fernández Vara assured that two of the challenges that the regional executive had to face during this legislature were the new CAP and the new FEDER Extremadura 2021-2027 operational program.
“Fundamental challenges” because “the environment was not exactly easy”, due to Brexit, which gave rise to “a great political and diplomatic battle by various officials at different levels, in which the credibility that the Spanish government had before the European Union ”, he said.
In this way he indicated that “a path of negotiation, commitment and dialogue” has begun, while he agreed that for Extremadura “it was essential to maintain the amounts of the Community Agricultural Policy”, while he advanced that “70 -80 for 100 of the farmers and the winners, if all the parameters of the CAP are respected, will be able to receive more money than they received until now ”.
Likewise, she stressed that in the design of the new CAP there was “a fundamental element” regarding the generational change and help for young farmers, as well as the inclusion and support of women in this sector.
REGIONALIZATION
The regional leader also pointed out that this new plan had “a sword of Damocles” which was regionalization. “Two and a half years ago this was more than lost until we came to the conclusion of maintaining regionalization in the tobacco regions.”
Regarding the latter, he said that Extremadura has maintained “a united response in the European context, with health policies in the midst of a pandemic, and with a mobilization like never before in history against everything that tobacco means and represents. “.
In this sense, he reiterated that Extremadura “does not produce tobacco, cigarettes”, but that Extremadura “produces the plant”.
Likewise, Fernández Vara indicated that the regionalization and unification of the irrigated regions of Las Vegas del Guadiana, with the inclusion of Miajadas, “was also, indisputably, good news,” he said.
Finally, the president of Extremadura pointed out that this new CAP also includes basic income and convergence aid, as well as the integration of pig farming, ecological schemes and the increase of direct aid “significantly”.
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