Analytics, EU – Baltic States, Latvia

The Commission is aware that the direct payments to farmers in Latvia are the smallest, compared to farmers in all other 27 EU member states – however, such were the conditions that Latvia signed upon the accession to the EU in 2004, and they will not be changed until 2013, said Kissmeyer-Nielsen. The Commission's "Health Check" on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is not a reform of the policy but just a set of minor corrections, and changing the criteria at this time is impossible, he said LETA.

Besides, compared farms' incomes in Latvia in 2001 and last year, they have increased threefold, and agriculture is not a hopeless national economy sector in Latvia. Farming is just like any other business, and one has to take into account that there are rises as well as falls, said Kissmeyer-Nielsen.

He said that he did not want to sound arrogant, but that the EU does not have a "remedy" for each problem. Kissmeyer-Nielsen wished Latvian farmers to be optimists and use the opportunities that they have. As for what criteria could be offered to Latvia's farmers after 2013, Kissmeyer-Nielsen said he was not entitled to talk about that.

As reported, Agriculture Minister of Latvia Martins Roze (Union of Greens and Farmers) is very dissatisfied with the Commission's decisions regarding the proposal to even out direct payments to farmers in EU member states.

Roze said that the Commission's proposals after the CAP "Health Check" do not envisage any adequate solutions to the problem of direct payments. According to the Commission, everything should be left as is.

Roze said in a statement to the press that Latvia insists that the CAP must be revised, first of all, to timely solve the question of new and justified criteria for distribution of financing in both direct payments and aid for rural development.

"If in a family one kid was being given three times less food as other children, the family doctor would sure notice it. Unfortunately, the Commission's so-called "health check" does not seem to notice the differences that farmers in various EU member states receive from the EU budget, which distort the market," Roze says in the statement. Roze also believes that the Commission's proposal to, without any objective criteria, simply transfer the money from the hefty direct payments for the original member states to the rural development program, is also unacceptable.

Further distribution of direct payments based on the historic criteria is unacceptable to Latvia because such distribution of funds does not contribute to the development of competitive and market-oriented farming and balanced development of rural areas.

The current historic criteria for distribution of aid are obsolete, Roze points out once again.

The Latvian Agriculture Ministry will continue looking for support in other member states for its position, to achieve that direct payments be leveled out after 2013.