On the 6th September 2016, DG AGRI presented the Cork Declaration “A better life in rural areas”. The discussions organised with the stakeholders during this 2-day conference fed the final declaration in a bottom-up approach.
At Euromontana, we believe that a good implementation of the Cork Declaration would only be possible with the close collaboration between stakeholders and the European Commission. Thus, we have prepared a document to present some contributions of mountain areas for the implementation of the Cork Declaration. This document explained how our network is already doing some efforts for the implementation of this Declaration and how we will continue these efforts in the near future.
As the work has also to be done by the European Commission, we suggest solutions that can be implemented by the European Commission that will benefit not only mountain areas but also all rural areas.
In addition, we encourage the European Commission to transpose the Cork priorities into a real Agenda for rural areas that Euromontana has advocated for several years with, notably, the members of the European Countryside Movement; the Members of the European Parliament of the RUMRA (Rural, Mountainous and Remote Areas) Intergroup and the Committee of the Regions.
For the moment, no real Action Plan for the implementation of the Cork Declaration has been presented. As the CAP consultation has just been launched this week to think about the future of European agriculture and rural development, we strongly encourage all our members and more widely all stakeholders to express their support to develop a real agenda for rural areas.
2 February 2017
