Mr President, I should like to begin by saying how appalled I am that Commissioner Fischler is not here. This simply defies belief, given the importance of the debate. Farmers have a right to decent incomes. The guarantee of profitable producer prices must, therefore, be the guiding premise of the common agricultural policy, in order to ensure farmers a decent standard of living on a par with other sectors of activity. This will in turn ensure that agricultural activity is sustained throughout EU territory. While these aims are enshrined in the CAP, the mechanisms of the policy – placing emphasis on reducing producer prices and on liberalising the agriculture markets both externally and internally – are entirely at variance with them. We know that this policy has been responsible for the disappearance of thousands of agricultural holdings and jobs, promoting the concentration, intensification and verticalisation of production, the centralisation of land ownership and the growing rural exodus. It has, furthermore, exacerbated the injustice of the uneven allocation of agricultural production aid among producers, production and countries. It is this model that, twelve years after the 1992 CAP reform, perpetuates the profound injustice that 20% of the major holdings receive 80% of aid. In Portugal, 1% of the major holdings receive almost half of this aid, a situation that we have always contested. The current reform of the CAP, with the decoupling of production aid based on historical references, perpetuates this imbalance. The decision not to proceed with genuine modulation and the establishment of aid limits was something of a missed opportunity. Aid should not be simply a matter of transferring money to rural development, but should instead act to offset the profound inequalities in the distribution of aid among farmers and countries. It is also important to point out that reduced prices of products and increased production costs, even taking into account the partial compensation of production aid, led to the disappearance of around 16% of agricultural holdings between 1995 and 2002. Not that consumers saw the benefits of these price reductions. The consumer price index rose, in fact, during the period concerned by around 11%, while the producer price index fell by more than 1%. A determining – and worrying – factor in this situation is the gradual deregulation of the CAP’s market mechanisms, in addition to the fact that these mechanisms discriminate between continental and Mediterranean production. In view of the volatility and uniqueness of the agriculture sector, effective mechanisms must be introduced to regulate the market and to stabilise supply, so as to guarantee farm incomes. It is also important, as the rapporteur advocates, that we provide adequate external protection for agriculture and that we create Community mechanisms enabling us to intervene in any disaster that may befall the sector. We also feel that rural development should be strengthened, yet this would entail increasing the agriculture budget, not freezing it until 2013, as decided at the Copenhagen Council. Increasing the agriculture budget would make it possible to offer compensation to farmers in the least-favoured regions or to those on lower incomes. This is essential if we are to maintain multifunctional agriculture and high quality farm produce.

Political group: GUE-NGL