By Chris Jones - 22nd June 2006
French farm minister Dominique Bussereau has called the European commission’s planned reform of the EU wine market “unacceptable”.
France, along with Italy and Spain, accounts for the lion’s share of EU wine production, and its farmers would be hit hard by commission proposals to scrap lucrative production subsidies, announced on Thursday.
The minister said the decision to remove subsidies such as those for crisis distillation – turning excess wine into ethyl alcohol – was “premature” and that an alternative support system should be put in place first.
He also criticised plans to shift money set aside for supporting wine producers into the more general rural development fund.
Digging up vineyards – the commission wants to remove 400,000ha of vines in the next five years – is not the only solution, Bussereau argued.
“Grubbing up is one possible solution, and could work in certain regions to respond to local problems, but it should not be the core principle of the EU’s wine policy.”
“What we should be concentrating on is supporting the sale and marketing of wine instead.”
Bussereau said the commission’s proposal was based on an incorrect assessment of the state of the market, and that it “lacked the ambition” that the EU wine industry needed to compete more effectively with New World rivals.
“France can only reject the majority of the options put forward by the commission,” Bussereau said in a statement.
But he said some elements of the proposal were worth retaining, including plans to expand subsidies for the renovation and restructuring of vineyards and an easing of wine-making techniques.
Spain, another major wine producer, has also criticised the plans put forward by EU farm commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel.
Spanish agriculture minister José Puxeu said the proposal did not strike the right balance between the major companies selling wine and the smaller farms producing it.
He stressed that Spain would not agree to any proposal that reduced its capacity to be the world’s biggest wine producer.
Copa-Cogeca, the Brussels-based NGO that represents European farmers, said that the plans would not help protect EU wine producers from foreign competition.
The massive grubbing up of vineyards suggested by the commission will destabilise several wine regions in the EU and… the resulting reduction in wine production in the EU will rapidly be replaced with wine imports from third countries,” the organisation said in a statement.
It also criticised the lack of detail on how EU wines could be better marketed to compete with New World wines, and added that “the alcohol and health policy pursued by the commission could very well undermine every promotion action for European wines on the internal market”.
The farmers’ lobby was particularly critical of Fischer Boel’s suggestion that wine-making techniques and labelling requirements be relaxed to reduce costs.
“Wine is not an industrial product. Wine is a processed agricultural product which is not defined by the final result only, but also by its processing method.”
“While consumers need clear information, at the same time the authenticity and quality of the produce must be preserved.”
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