Kislépték/NationalUnion for Representing the Interests of Small-scale Farmers, the organiser ofthe Hungarian National Committee of IYFF + 10 was honoured as Dr Agnes Major,the coordinator of the Hungarian National Committees was asked to make apresentaition on a family farming conference, which was held on OMÉK 2015(National Agricultural and Food Fair).
Lecturers of the conference examined the matter offamily farming from many prospective:
Dr Zsolt Feldman deputy state secretary responsible for theagrarian-economy at the Agricultural Ministry said in its welcome speech thatthis conference seeks measure to strengthen family farming in internationalcontext, but specially focusing within the Carpathian Basin.
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Raimund Jahle Coordinator of Regional Initiations at the European andCentral-Asia Regional Office of the Food and Agriculture Organization of theUnited Nations said in his welcome speech that family farming is part of themodern Europe, since 85% of the farms are family farms in Europe. It is theirspecialty that they are the basis of the rural life and these people regardthis as their lifestyle while they make a lot preserving traditions.
Zoltán Kálmán Permanent Representative ofHungary at the Rome based UN agriculture and food organisations held a presentation with the titleof “Civil involvement in development of family farming”.He told us that there are 570 million farms around the world of which 90 % arefamily farms. Their scale is so small that their accesses to resources (land,technology or market) are very limited. Each country may have a differentsolution to keep the social, environmental, economic balance but in order toensure sustainability solutions must be found for each elements and not tosolve only one. In the lecture we could learn that as a closing of theInternational Year of Family Farming 2014 a publication with the title “DeepRoots” was issued which may be downloaded on the following link: LINK
Mike McKenzie political analyst of the Agriculturaland Rural Development Directorate General of the European Commission held hispresentation with the title of “Diversity of family farming in Europe” emphasisedthe importance of the cooperation and innovation.
Attila Juhász state secretary of the SerbianAgricultural Ministry emphasized in his presentation with the title of“Challenges in South Eastern European countries, particularly regarding theVajdaság” that they regard special importance to the role of the added value. Inorder to foster these goals the Serbian small-scale producers regulation wasadopted by having used the Hungarian ruling and experience. [We would likeproudly add to this good news that Kislépték owns a tiny part of to theexistence of the Serbian ruling since we met twice and shared our Hungarianexperiences with the civil community in Vajdaság which initiated the Serbiansmall-scale production regulation.]Dr Márta Torda head of the International andCarpathian Basin Connection (Carpathian Basin Cooperation Department) MainDepartment held a presentation instead of Katalin Tóth deputy state secretarywith the title of “Family farming during the war – experiences fromZakarpattya”.
Katalin Rácz deputy head of Rural DevelopmentResearch Department at Research Institute of Agricultural Economy made a veryinteresting presentation with the title of “Effects of EU enlargement forfamily farming – does the innovative family farming model exist in Hungary?” Wecould learn an up to date information on family farming data, research andconclusions.
Dr Agnes Major coordinator of the HungarianNational Committee of Family Farming held her presentation with a bit dramatictitle: “How we could go about? Cry for help – the Hungarian reality (genres,experiences, life situation waiting for solution”. The presentation was specially focusing onmatters and problems related to small-scale producers and family farming stillto be solved. It was explained that the role of family farming is larger inHungary of which is calculated by policy makers, agrarian science orstatisticians since Government has to deal with farms which are below theeconomic size threshold. Family farms are not performing industrial size orproduction but operate in small-scale level so the rules related to theiroperation must also adopt this. We called the attention that in there-definition of family farms in relation to the new land sale and purchaseregulations has to take into account several elements, such as the extendedrelationship of the family. Regarding to the territorial scope of the of thesmall-scale production decree we claimed again that small-scale producer maysell apricot from Bács-Kiskun (the place of origin of this very high quality ofapricot) and Budapest, but in all of the other counties. We also called theattention that several raw materials of artisan products are regarded presentlyas animal originated waste of by-product which are ruled to be handled uponindustrial level of regulations while one produces small-scale, hand-madeproduct on a traditional way. We took the opportunity to expound the positionof the European Commission regarding to herbs which says shortly that the drugregulations shall not apply to such herb related product with medical effectwhich produced on non-industrial, i.e. artisan way.
