Confederation press conference attended by Michał Waver and Jan Krysiak, on 5 August 2024.
Michał Wawer:
– Donald Tusk's government has tricked farmers again! A fewer months ago, erstwhile a wave of agricultural strikes swept through Poland, as part of negotiations with agricultural environments, Minister of Agriculture Czesław Siekierski promised and personally promised that the agricultural taxation was not raised this yearthat the government will reprocess a bill that will warrant farmers the amount of agricultural taxation at the level that the agricultural taxation had last year.
And that promise has been broken in fresh days!
On the pages of the Government Legislative Centre, it has been announced that this existing complex bill functioning in the Government Legislative Centre is being withdrawn from work due to the fact that – attention – The government is incapable to safe funding, incapable to identify the means from which it would be covered! This is obviously, in a way, absurd, due to the fact that it sounds like the government is going to pay for these taxes to be lower. It's just that the government would have little income, but seemingly the government can't even afford it.
I looked into this bill in the first task that the Minister of Agriculture has prepared, it is provided that the cost to the budget, the cost of these reduced incomes would be 290 million according to the estimates of the Minister of Agriculture. specified a cost would be to aid Polish farmers to reduce the fiscal burden on them this year. And the government says there's no 290 million. There is no way, nothing can be done, these funds are not in the Polish budget.
At the same time, the same government, by force, is struggling hard to cost over 20 billion zlotys over a 10-year period, in spite of the opinion of the vast majority of rights, to push through, through the Sejm, programs specified as a 0% loan, which according to experts' calculations, will cost over 20 billion zlotys over a 10-year period, or 100 times as much as the simplification in the agricultural taxation cost in the fulfilment of the promise of the Minister of Agriculture, or 20 billion for developers, will always be found, then the government of Donald Tusk will pull even from the ground, even if it is to be simply ripped from the throat of Polish citizens, but the amount 100 times smaller, 290 million to relieve Polish farmers, this will not be possible to find, for this, neither the Prime Minister nor the Minister of Finance will allow!
Poland needs an agriculture minister who will fight with much more determination and much more energy than Minister Siekierski for the interests of Polish farmers in Poland and at European Union level. The European Union, which is constantly pushing the European Green Deal, and, as we have learned from Ursuli von der Leyen's exposé, will only get worse, will only get harder and harder.
These are not times for a minister like Czesław Siekierski. We request a real warrior in the Ministry of Agriculture and the Government of Tusk unfortunately for apparent reasons to give it to us he does not want, due to the fact that he just intends to make more promises to farmers to break, break and break!
