Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has highlighted how important the agriculture sector is to Hungary’s development.
The prime minister addressed Parliament during the inaugural session of the National Agriculture Chamber’s (NAK) national delegate assembly and said Hungary would not have a future without the land owned by Hungarian farmers.
He said the three most precious elements of the Hungarian economy were the people, land and water. Hungary will not be a “front yard” for any other nation, he said.
“Our national guiding principle says that this is our land, our labor, it belongs to us and it must benefit us,” he said.
The prime minister added that the future of Hungarian agriculture was promising, but the sector was under threat from bureaucrats in Brussels who wanted to use increasingly large chunks of the European Union’s budget to solve one-off problems arising from issues like migration.
He added that EU funds for this should be reallocated from traditional development funds, such as the funds earmarked for the Common Agricultural Policy. The Hungarian farm ministry had “put up a good fight” in Brussels and most member states had accepted Hungary’s position on the matter.
As a result, the EU’s agriculture funds for the current funding period will remain untouched, PM Orbán said. He added that the EU would also need to allocate sufficient funding for its common agricultural policy in the future.
The prime minister said that Hungary’s farm sector has been among the three fastest-growing agriculture sectors in the EU since 2010. Between 2010 and 2017, agricultural production in Hungary grew by over 50 percent, he added.