Saxon farmers with loudest protest in front of the state parliament

A lot of horsepower and loud protest: Dozens of farmers drove tractors in front of the Saxon Parliament on Wednesday morning to protest against the delayed payment of EU funds. They expressed their displeasure with a concert of horns and placards. "This is just the tip of the iceberg," said Marc Bernhardt, spokesman for the association "Land schafft Verbindung." They didn't just come for the money from Brussels, he said. "This is just the icing on the cake of professional missteps in recent years."

Parallel to the protest, the parliament's agricultural committee convened in the morning in the state parliament for a special session. Last Friday, the Saxon Ministry of Agriculture had conceded that because of problems with the software adjustment, it does not come as usual in December to a disbursement. Instead, the money - about 241 million euros for about 7000 farms - should be paid out by the end of February at the latest, it said. The ministry claimed that regulations on the European Union's common agricultural policy have been fundamentally changed from 2023 and that there is a lack of IT specialists for the software adjustments.

Every company has its farm planning, Bernhardt said. People have bills to pay at the end of the year, he said, including leases, insurance and contributions to the workers' compensation board. "This is bad news for one or two businesses. Companies are reaching their limits when it comes to liquidity." At the same time, 2023 has been a relatively expensive year for agriculture, he said. "We created a crop with very high costs." But prices tended to be poor, he said. For individual farms, it was now a matter of existence, he said. They needed bridging loans.

Bernhardt accused Agriculture Minister Wolfram Günther (Greens) to be "far away from the practice". He said Günther was focusing primarily on the organic sector and regional marketing. He said the ministry is pursuing "regressive agriculture." "We are more and more with our backs against the wall," Bernhardt said. He added that Saxon farmers were being increasingly restricted in their entrepreneurial freedom of movement and were being given more and more requirements.