Mr. Peter Welch:

A point was made about the dynamic of people leaving farming. The Deputy highlighted an issue. The Commission's communication on The Future of Food and Farming draws attention to the number of smallholdings among the beneficiaries of the CAP. I cannot find the exact numbers but a very large percentage have less than 5 ha. As the Deputy points out, many older farmers are concentrated in that area. In our work, we are sometimes in different parts of Europe, visiting some of those very small farms - much smaller than 30 ha - run by older people. In those circumstances, those people will carry on farming for as long as they are there. When they go on, their farm will be almost systematically consolidated into a neighbouring holding because no young person will take over a small farm in a mountainous area and have a subsistence living starting in his or her 20s or 30s. No one will do that. That is a big reason for which people move out of farming. That degree of consolidation will always be there.

Another thing we see around Europe is that economic circumstances are very different in different places. There are places where people move out of farming because there are good jobs to be had in other sectors. One cannot stop them. That will also happen. There are also farmers who are losing their markets. That is a much more painful process. We are looking at income stabilisation mechanisms which are a means to stop a person from being forced to give up farming after just one or two bad years. We will look at that shortly to see if those mechanisms are working.

One of the many issues in this sector which constrains what we can do is that we look at European policies and how European spending works but we do not look at the whole range of factors which apply to farmers, such as inheritance tax, inheritance laws and so on. All of these things are national competencies. It is true of our recommendations and of the limits within which the Commission works that only a certain number of levers can be pulled from Brussels. Many levers remain in national hands and it is not really our job to tell different member states how to organise their internal affairs. We leave it to politicians to take political decisions and we also try to respect the rights of member states to take their own decisions in their areas of competence.