János Áder: farmers must adapt to climate change in the Carpathian Basin

Hungarian farmers have to adapt to the rapid changes in the environment around them 

- emphasized the President of the Republic in his speech at the NAK Szántóföldi Days and Agricultural Equipment Show-Mezőfalva event.

According to János Áder, adaptation will be the key word in the coming years, Hungarian farmers must also adapt, for example, to the world's demographic changes, as the world's population will increase by another two billion by 2050. All of this poses a great challenge to agriculture, which has to produce adequate quantity and quality of food from less and less water on soil of increasingly poor quality.

The head of state believed that they should adapt to the global economic processes , which have brought a 40 percent increase in food prices in the past year, they should follow the regulations of the European Union, which set the goal of reducing the use of plant protection agents and fertilizers from 2023, and in the field of organic farming increase.

János Áder emphasized that farmers must also adapt to climate change, which will arrive in the Carpathian basin earlier and will probably be more severe than in other parts of Europe.

Winemakers and those involved in plant cultivation should look for answers in the field of breed breeding and cultivation technology change , he opined. In addition, farmers must also adapt to changing consumer needs , since the standard of living has increased everywhere in recent years, which has increased the demand for higher quality processed products, explained the head of state.

Minister of Agriculture István Nagy called the government's decision to increase the level of national co-financing from 17.5 percent to 80 percent in addition to EU funding . Thanks to this, farmers can get 4,265 billion investment subsidies, which is three times as much as in the previous seven years.

He noted that the Ministry of Agriculture will only make it possible to access this year's HUF 950 billion tender funds, for which anyone from the smallest to the largest can apply.

Balázs Győrffy, the president of the National Chamber of Agrarian Economy, recalled that the negotiations on the reform of the common agricultural policy (CAP) failed in Brussels, because they ignored the opinions of the member countries and agricultural organizations, they want to impose unacceptable and unfulfillable requirements on farmers, thereby ensuring unlimited benefits from outside the EU for future, uncontrolled food. In agreement with MAGOSZ, he called on the European Parliament to cooperate with the member states, take professional arguments into account in the transformation of the CAP and try to accept that farmers are needed in the long term. He announced that an online petition was launched from Wednesday to put pressure on the European Union, which might listen to the farmers.

István Jakab, the vice-president of the Parliament and the president of MAGOSZ, called it a goal to fully utilize the five million hectares of Hungarian agricultural land as a resource, which requires serious developments.

According to him, resources for this and any new technologies are useless if there is no water, so special attention must be paid to water management.

MTI, vasarnap.hu