From Politico.eu via Izabella Kaminska's The Blind Spot, October 6:
Meet the farmers who control one-third of the EU’s budget (POLITICO)
BRUSSELS — Franc Bogovič spent 16 years selling pesticides. Now he’s leading the charge in Brussels against an EU master plan to wean farmers off them.
The 60-year-old European lawmaker lives in the Kozjanski Park — a biodiversity hotspot in eastern Slovenia that is protected under EU law — and owns a commercial apple orchard on its fringes.
But Bogovič, who represents the center-right European People’s Party, is also one of the European Parliament’s key lawmakers responsible for amending the highly contentious pesticide reduction bill, which aims to halve the use of toxic agrochemicals by the end of the decade while promoting the uptake of safer, non-chemical alternatives.
Among the 48 lawmakers on the EU’s powerful agriculture committee, Bogovič is no oddity. Eleven of its members — including his EPP colleagues Simone Schmiedtbauer and Jarosław Kalinowski — have declared farming as an outside activity, according to a tally by accountability watchdog Transparency International. These include Frenchman Jérémy Decerle, of the liberal Renew Europe, who breeds cows for meat. Organic farmers Benoît Biteau and Martin Häusling represent the Greens on the committee.
In reality, the number of farmers on the agriculture committee overseeing the EU’s €387 billion farm aid budget is higher. Annie Schreijer-Pierik of the EPP has, for example, handed control of her pig farm in the Netherlands to her son and daughter-in-law. And substitute committee member Jan Huitema, a Dutch MEP for Renew Europe, is a partner in a cattle farm with his father.
The heavy representation of farmers on the committee has put a roadblock in the way of the European Commission, which wants to put greater emphasis on environmental sustainability and the interests of consumers as part of its Farm to Fork policy agenda.
“The committee is just stacked with farmers,” said Nicholas Aiossa of Transparency International. While such conflicts of interest do arise elsewhere, the agriculture committee had been “the most consistent” case of such overrepresentation over the years, he said....
....MUCH MORE, quite a story.
