|
 European
Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel is planning
a massive global campaign to promote European wine,
hoping to boost a sector suffering from overproduction
and New World competition, reports turkishpress.com
from an upload from AFP, France.
"In the project of wine sector reform, which I
will present to EU member states on July 4, I will introduce
propositions to launch a large-scale promotional campaign,"
Fischer Boel told AFP in an interview.
This will involve "very significant figures for
promotion outside Europe ... people will be very surprised,"
she added, days ahead of a meeting of European agriculture
ministers in Mainz, Germany.
The campaign will help European exports at a time
when the world market is increasing steadily, she said..
The promotion campaign will be carried out outside
of Europe, where a public health campaign, also launched
by the Commission, calls for alcohol to be drunk in
moderation.
European wines have increasingly seen their market share
eroded by competition from cheaper New World wines from
countries and regions such as Australia, Chile, California
and even China.
Such newcomers have exploded onto world markets in
recent years, soaring from 1.7 percent of world exports
in the early 1980s to over 20 percent now.
The European Commission believes that deep reform of
the sector is needed urgently. Without changes the EU
could face lakes of surplus wine akin to butter mountains
and other areas of overproduction seen in the past.
Last year Brussels presented plans for substantial
reform of the wine sector, aimed at ending the chronic
overproduction and decreasing the subsidies paid to
viticulturists.
In October the European Commission allocated 450 million
euros (567 million dollars) to Europe's struggling wine
producers to help them restructure or relocate their
vineyards.
This would include uprooting 400,000 hectares of vineyards
to tackle the wine glut, 12 percent of the EU total,
and distilling some of the 500 million euros worth of
surplus wine produced for use as bio-fuel.
Source www.turkishpress.com
|
