The European Commission has adopted an exceptional support package of 330 million euros to support agricultural businesses. Farmers in Italy, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, Spain, France, Croatia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia, Finland, and Sweden will have access to this funding, while Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Slovak farmers will receive separate support of 100 million euros to tackle market imbalances.
This support package is also justified by the European Commission: the 2023 edition of the "Report on short-term prospects for EU agricultural markets" has been recently published by the European Commission and shows the latest trends and prospects for agricultural markets.
Financial aid comes at a time when farmers continue to face difficulties, as indicated in the report published by the European Commission on the short-term prospects for the EU agricultural markets. EU farmers still face higher than average long-term production costs and some agricultural commodity prices continue to fall. During spring, farmers also had to cope with different and difficult weather conditions, which resulted in lower yields and lower quality of several basic agricultural products. Despite the obvious difficulties, the agricultural sector has nevertheless shown some initial signs of improvement. For example, fertilisers have become more accessible due to the drop of natural gas prices. Moreover, although still above the general inflation rate, food inflation in the EU is starting to stabilise.