Brussels would sacrifice Hungary’s agricultural subsidies for Ukraine’s EU membership, says Orbán cabinet

The European Union’s policy ignoring the situation and interests of farmers “has been turbo charged”: the EU “wants to submit the Common Agricultural Policy after 2027 to Ukraine’s accession”, Fidesz MEP Csaba Dömötör said in Brussels on Wednesday.

Speaking to Hungarian journalists, Dömötör said “a series of documents and statements prove” that Brussels wanted to curb CAP “to make way for future expenses for Ukraine’s accession.”

“The first victim” is expected to be the area-based support system, “a source of income for 150,000 farmers and their families in Hungary alone,” he said. Agriculture funding would be merged with other funds to mask the loss of funding, he said.

The “fast-tracked accession of Ukraine would add some 40 million hectares of farmland to the EU, most of it in the hands of western European and transatlantic corporations, Dömötör said.

The European Union decided to open its market before Ukraine in 2022, significantly harming eastern European farmers, he said.

According to the Farm Europe organisation, at least 70 materials are used in Ukrainian pesticides that are banned in the EU, he said. The EP has said clearly that the current regulations would cut farming subsidies by at least 20 percent, he added.

Meanwhile, European farmers still have no information on the degree to which the European Commission would open the markets in June, he said. “So consequences could appear within weeks, rather than with years,” he added.

“The Brussels party of Peter Magyar”, the European People’s Party, is the figurehead of the drive to dismantle the EU agricultural funding system, he said.