Speech by the Minister of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies, Stefano Patuanelli in a press conference with the EU Commissioner for Agriculture, Janusz Wojciechowski
We have worked in recent months with the Council to ensure that the post-2020 CAP reform, an epochal reform, was designed to meet the needs of farmers in all Member States and bring agriculture into a new phase, a phase in which it is necessary to find the right balance between environmental, economic and social sustainability. I believe that the balance with many difficulties has also been found thanks to the excellent work that the Commission has developed and with the mediation conducted by Commissioner Wojciechowski.
Today we retraced those moments and we wanted to look to the future and to what the Member States are called to on the National Strategic Plans: an absolutely new element of the CAP that will allow us to equip producers, the farms, with all the tools necessary to achieve the objectives that the CAP has set.
We have the opportunity to direct Italian producers into a new phase thanks to new technologies, precision agriculture and production techniques that are the basis of Italian production and that allow us to maintain a great specificity of Italian agricultural products and increase production capacity. and competitiveness.
I am confident that all this will take place within the timeframe we set ourselves in the construction of the Strategic Plan, with the involvement of numerous interested parties: trade unions and producers, environmental organizations, institutions, which in the Partnership Table are already working on the grid that will compose the National Strategic Plan.
The legal framework of the new CAP is not yet final. We guarantee the maximum effort to reach the conclusion of this path by December 31st of this year.
Together with Commissioner Wojciechowski we touched on some other topics related to climate problems, to the adversities that are repeated every day not only in our country but throughout Europe, as in Germany and Belgium, the frosts that have hit France and Italy in recent months. Italy, the great hailstorms in July and the fires in Sardinia.
I thank the Commissioner for supporting today the value of our production model made up of small companies, entrepreneurs, who invest their days to protect our territory and give us products of the highest quality and excellence. We will meet again in Florence at the Ministerial of Agriculture at the G20 on 17 and 18 September where we will continue to address these very important issues for the planet.