Agriculture - Support for petition against the abolition of agricultural subsidies
Over 900,000 signatures have been collected for a petition against the planned abolition of agricultural subsidies. This makes it the most successful petition on the Change.org platform in 2023, as the operators announced on Thursday afternoon. Farmer Marie von Schnehen from Friedland in southern Lower Saxony started the petition on December 17.
"I am absolutely delighted with the huge response, we have more than three times as many signatures as there are farms in Germany," said von Schnehen, who runs the Klein Schneen farm together with her family. She hopes that the petition will draw attention to the issue. Among the reasons given by signatories for signing was that they were worried about their profession or German agriculture as a whole, as comments show.
Von Schnehen said that she had launched the petition in order to possibly change something about the planned cuts. She emphasized: "I am a farmer and not a member of a party."
The farmer is calling on the federal government to retain the tax exemption for motor vehicles in agriculture and the agricultural diesel rebate. The government is currently planning to abolish both in order to close a hole in the budget. Von Schnehen has also started a second petition to the Bundestag.
"I'm worried about the planned cuts, I'll lose two months' income as a result," said the farmer. Money that she and other farmers had calculated with for the coming year and that would be missing for investments in sustainability, for example. "In the worst-case scenario, the cuts will mean that more farms will have to close their doors due to increasing cost pressure."
The removal of subsidies is a disproportionate burden for agriculture and would lead to a competitive disadvantage compared to farmers from abroad, writes von Schnehen in her petition. In addition, farmers would not be able to simply switch to other, more climate-friendly means of propulsion, such as agricultural diesel. Agricultural machinery is still dependent on fossil fuels. Farmers, she said, "don't fly to Mallorca with diesel, they keep food production going".
Petition
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- Given the success of the petition in Lower Saxony, Germany, other peaceful countries might consider similar encouragements for their agrarian sectors facing potential subsidy abolitions.
- Farmers in Lower Saxony, like Marie von Schnehen, are utilizing petitions as a promotion tool to maintain agricultural subsidies, such as the tax exemption for motor vehicles and the agricultural diesel rebate.
- Despite being a farmer and not a political member, von Schnehen's peaceful petition against the abolition of agricultural subsidies in Germany has gathered nearly a million signatures.
- The agrarian sector in Germany, including Lower Saxony, relies heavily on these subsidies for their day-to-day operations, and the removal of such subsidies would result in a competitive disadvantage on a global scale.
Source: www.stern.de
