BAD DOBERAN (dpa-AFX) – Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig (SPD) supports the farmers’ demands and is calling on the traffic light government in Berlin to completely reverse the planned subsidy cuts for agriculture. “The farmers are pissed off. And rightly so, because two sources of funding are to be withdrawn from them overnight without prior notice,” said Schwesig on Monday after talks with farmers at a protest in Bad Doberan.
It is good that the federal government has taken the vehicle tax plans off the table. “But now the plans for agricultural diesel also have to be taken off the table,” emphasized Schwesig. It is important that the farmers are spoken to immediately and the dispute is resolved. The way the traffic light coalition decided overnight without talking to the farmers was the last straw. Like Schwesig, Lower Saxony’s SPD Prime Minister Stephan Weil also called on the federal government to reverse the planned subsidy cuts for agriculture.
The federal government wants to gradually eliminate tax subsidies for agricultural diesel. Another proposal to overturn the tax exemption for agricultural machinery has now been taken off the table.
In the morning, Schwesig and Agriculture Minister Till Backhaus (both SPD) sought talks with protesting farmers near Bad Doberan and expressed understanding for their attitude. The farmers learned about the federal government’s decisions from the press. This is not good behavior, criticized Schwesig. “The federal government really needs to adopt a different kind of policy in the future,” she told the German Press Agency.
Backhaus expressly praised the good organization of the protests and thanked the farmers’ association as well as the police and interior authorities. Everything went very peacefully and in a matter-of-fact way. “We need agriculture to live, it produces our food,” said Backhaus. Agriculture is a sector of the economy of great importance that will continue to be urgently needed in the future./hr/DP/men