The European Commission announced on 4 February a proposal to extend the financing of the "Community Tobacco Fund" until 2010. This Fund is financed through a tax over tobacco production subsidies: 5% of the amount of subsidies is set aside for awareneess-raising campaigns about dangers of tobacco.
EU ministers have agreed in 2004 to phase out EU tobacco production subsidies by 2010, but production-linked subsidies are replaced by other ("decoupled") payments and tobacco growers will not be disqualified from these subsidies. The reality is therefore that the EU will continue to subsidise tobacco producers, even after 2010. Reacting to the news, Roger Albinyana i Saigi, President of European Liberal Youth - LYMEC, stressed: 'This money that the EU gives to tobacco producers is a total absurdity. Tobacco kills in total more than 500,000 EU citizens and around 1 million Europeans each year'. Before proposing: 'Tobacco growers should simply be disqualified from EU support and the money should be used 100%, not just 5%, for awareness-raising campaigns'.
Aloys Rigaut, Vice-President of LYMEC, added: 'It is simply unbelievable that the EU was spending until recently 1% of its budget, i.e. about 1 billion euro per year, on tobacco production subsidies.That is more than twice the annual budget of Erasmus... We need to rethink EU budget's priorities'. He then underlined: 'The European Commission tries to make us believe that there will not be any subsidies to tobacco growers after 2010, but this is false. They replaced one system by another one, but it comes to almost the same result. We wish to get rid of the Common Agricultural Policy altogether and replace it by a Common Environmental or Food Safety Policy, that would be more transparent for EU citizens '.
LYMEC is preparing a Europe-wide campaign against the Common Agricultural Policy: 'CAP is crap: EU Budget needs new priorities'. The leaflets and website of the campaign should be available as from May 2008.
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