Political row over EU emergency fund for dairy farmers

MEPs will today debate plans to provide immediate financial help to support Europe's ailing dairy industry.

Meeting in Strasbourg on Monday, members of parliament's agriculture committee are expected to endorse the creation of a new special fund to help European milk producers cope with a crisis in the sector.

Under a compromise deal agreed earlier by the assembly's budgets committee, some €300m is expected to be made available to dairy farmers in 2010.

The establishment of the fund comes after angry dairy farmers staged demonstrations in Brussels and elsewhere, protesting over the impact of the recession on the industry.

The issue is expected to be put to the vote in full plenary on Thursday.

However, today's debate has been overshadowed by claims that the EPP, parliament's biggest group, had "turned its back" on dairy farmers by rejecting proposals for €600m to be made available.

Portuguese MEP Luis Capoulas Santos, the Socialist group spokesman on agriculture, said the EPP had "rejected this initiative" during a committee vote on the EU budget for 2010.

"The dairy sector is facing a dramatic crisis caused by a lack of demand and it needs a stimulus plan to cope with it," he said.

"The €600m fund we proposed is designed to support milk producers to cope with the consequences of the current crisis in the short term".

Santos said this figure could be financed by "using part of the money left aside for natural resources in the 2010 EU budget".

However, he added that the EPP had "turned its back" on the dairy farmers by cutting the amount to €300m.

The Socialist deputy said his group would not call on the EPP to "defy the line the group had taken and back our proposal for a €600m milk fund".

And he called on the commission to "put forward a set of new and concrete measures, including more generous school milk schemes and aid for private storage of cheese".

Hungarian deputy Laszlo Surjan, EPP rapporteur for the 2010 EU budget, hit back by saying, "The Socialists accuse the EPP of 'turning its back on dairy farmers' by rejecting the creation of a €600m fund.

"Nothing can be further from the truth. It was the EPP group alone that launched, in 2007, the campaign to create the fund and has worked for it ever since.

"There can be no question of the EPP abandoning its commitment to the fund. It is an EPP initiative.

"However, the EPP does not make promises it knows cannot be kept.

"Budgetary realities mean that only €300m will be available in 2010 - as much as we would have liked to have a bigger fund.

"A figure of €600m would have been struck down immediately by EU ministers because it breaks agreed spending limits. But €300m is compatible with the budgetary ceilings."

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