CATTLE farmers will this evening begin to assemble in Kofinou ahead of tomorrow’s peaceful rally to Limassol where they hope to meet EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel.
The farmers, who are unhappy with the amount of compensation allotted to them by the government, said they would not hesitate to take on police if they tried to put a stop to their progress.
A number of farmers intend to spend the night at Kofinou and will set off for Limassol at 8am tomorrow for the opening session of the European conference ‘Europe’s Rural Areas in Action: Facing the Challenges of Tomorrow’.
The farmers hope to meet with the EU Commissioner some time during the two-day conference in order to address the problems they face and to discuss their demands, as well as to give her a detailed memorandum of all events.
Ahead of the meeting, the Cyprus Organisation of Cattle Farmers prepared a letter addressed to Boel, which it handed to Androulla Kaminara, Head of the European Commission Representation in Cyprus.
“You may already have been informed that this year Cyprus is going through its worst drought in living memory. In some sectors of agriculture and livestock, such as feeding stuffs, local production has been zero and we import all our requirements in roughages such as straw, hay and silage from abroad, at prices two and three times higher than in a normal year,” the farmers said.
In its letter, the organisation said it wanted to discuss the government’s discriminatory attitude in favour of all sectors of animal and crop production, except the dairy sector.
“We expect we can discuss it with you, since this issue in effect concerns European Institutions and Legislation, as the adverse discriminatory handling of the dairy sector vis-à-vis other sectors is in direct opposition to European practice and legislation and in addition violates competition regulations,” the famers said.
The organisation said that under the compensation package, all other sectors would receive 50 per cent of the losses they had suffered as a result of the drought but that the dairy sector, “without any convincing reason”, would only receive 25 per cent.
They also informed the Commissioner that all efforts to approach the government to review its decision had failed.
