Summary of newspapers of the previous day – 15. 8. 2011

Land more than gold, 14 hectares of it disappear every day

Over last five year people have liquidated fields with acreage larger than Brno. Instead of them satellite towns and solar and logistic parks grew up. Will farmers be able to maintain us in the future or will we be forced to import most of foods? Meantime we do everything for the latter. Only over the last five years about 39 thousand hectares of arable land have disappeared in the Czech Republic. For comparison: Prague acreage is now about less than 50 thousand and Brno 23 thousand hectares. The problem is that the liquidated land can be hardly replaced. Creation of one centimeter of quality soil lasts for generations, according to expert studies as many as 100 to 400 years.

Farmers submitted almost 27 000 applications for subsidies, by 1000 more than last year

This year, farmers submitted 26 867 so called unified applications to the State Agricultural Intervention Fund (SZIF) in which they ask for main agrarian subsidies; year-on-yearly almost by 1000 more. It results from a statistics provided to ČTK by SZIF. The Fund expects to pay subsidies in amount of 37 milliard crowns this year, roughly by two milliards more than last year. On the unified form farmers applied mainly for direct payments from the EU paid per hectare of farmed area including complementary payments from the state budget to support so called sensitive commodities as potatoes or hops and other subsidies.

EU wants to protect better farmers against damages in future

The European Commission considers a possibility of higher compensation for farmers independently on a cause of incurred damage. “It is dealt with one of possibilities which is considered now internally by the European Commission”, a spokesman of the office in Brussels stated which confirms a report published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). However, for the present it is dealt only with a part of discussion, nothing has been decided yet”, the spokesman told. The Commission planned to negotiate all proposals of change of orientation of the EU agricultural policy in October.

Flight of farmer markets is complicated by lack of money on many places

Still two years ago nobody in the Czech Republic knows properly what farmer markets are. Today, stalls with production of Czech growers and producer can be found all over the republic in every bigger town. According to organizers, the most difficult at all is to go ahead with such an action. Money for promotion or for example for production of stalls is provided besides towns and the Ministry of Environment for example also by foundations. However, a financial crisis can slow down or completely stop the markets.