Poland: fruit and vegetable reform disadvantageous for growers

Miroslaw Maliszewski, the President of the Association of Polish Fruit-Growers and member of Polish parliament, stated that European Commission proposals concerning fruit and vegetable reform are unfavourable for Poland, since they assume withdrawing of some of the EU help used by Polish farmers so far. This is statement concerning abolishing of export refunds and refunds for growers of processing tomatoes. According to Maliszewski, these are major sources of financing the fruit and vegetable sector in Poland. He also noticed that Polish proposition of refunds for soft fruits assigned to processing, not only didn't gain approval but it isn’t considered at all.

The main idea of fruit and vegetables reform - presented during press conference on fruit and vegetables reform in Brussels on 24 January 2007 – is decoupling of current European Union support for processed fruit and vegetables (and therefore transferring it to the Single Payment Scheme) and strengthening Producer Organizations. But, according to Maliszewski, the European Commission didn’t consider Polish proposition of double increase of support for Producer Organizations. In his opinion, Poland will not benefit from EC’s proposition concerning greater co-financing of the PO's operational programmes, since Poland has a relatively small number of them. Such a solution will only increase disproportion in EU fruit and vegetable market, since countries which used the most of the support so far (Denmark, Netherlands, Germany and France) will receive in future even more help than before. “Countries with the highest number of POs will be beneficiares of the reform, and Poland has one of the smallest number of POs within the EU”. Only 2% of total production is marketed via POs in Poland, in contrast to about 80% in Denmark.

Source: www.freshplaza.com