Press Release CPE-COAG

PRESS RELEASE

Today March 8th, international women day, CPE and COAG, members of Via Campesina, denounce the legal and economical insecurity the women farmers are facing in Europe.

The present European agricultural policy and the WTO threaten the farm income, and that  increases the precarity of the farmwork and impacts even worsely on women farmers. The situation of legal insecurity faced by the women farmers in family farms is dramatic. The administrative rights of the farms are owned by the farm holder and very often the women, despite their work, don’t have access to these rights  (milk quotas, plantations rights, single payment rights, subsidies,…). This situation creates other difficulties: these women don’t have any own income recognised and suffer discriminations to get access to social security.

The migrant women coming from Eastern Europe or Africa to work in agriculture in Western or Central Europe do it in the most of cases under social and legal conditions unacceptable.

On March 8th, we ask then the European Commission to propose a directive imposing to the EU Member States to implement the legal parity of the women farmers, which garantees all social and labour rights, independently from the type of farm the women are working on. We ask also the Governments to work in that direction and to develop the necessary laws to reach the equal legal status of men and women in family farms and to end all discriminations towards women farmers.

Contact:
Ingeborg Tangeraas-  tel: + 47 95974242  ingtang@online.no