In a document presented to the Ministry, Unión de Uniones de Agricultores y Ganaderos has demanded that the extraordinary measures aimed at the Spanish wine sector be made public in order to overcome the crisis caused by COVID-19, so that both winegrowers and wineries can now, with just over two months to go before the start of the 2021 harvest, have the elements that will give them security for the campaign.
The agricultural organisation, which has already managed to organise the green harvest in 2020 despite the fact that the budget was insufficient, now urges the Ministry to contribute to this measure with all the budget that can be obtained from Brussels and from its own funds. It also proposes to release resources, if necessary from the 2021 Support Programme for the Spanish wine sector (PASVE), previously guaranteeing that the actions already started that end on 31 July 2021, corresponding to other measures such as restructuring, will be paid for when they were planned. However, "the decision as to whether or not there will be additional funds for extraordinary actions is the responsibility of the Commission and the Ministry itself, and it is up to them to decide how the PASVE will be affected", the organisation insists.
On the other hand, the Ministry has decided that the recipients of the distillation aid will be the distilleries (22 authorised distilleries received 65.39 million euros), which pay the wine in the cellars at the price they see fit, something that Unión de Uniones is critical of and which differs from the strategy followed by France.
France has provided state funding to alleviate the crisis caused by the pandemic.
In this sense, the neighbouring country earmarked 185 million euros for crisis distillation in 2020 last year, of which only 10 million directly for distillers, and the rest in the cellars.
Also, the prices of crisis distillation aid were much higher in France compared to Spain: 78 euros per hectolitre for DO or PGI wine and 58 euros per hectolitre for wine without PDO or PGI in France, while in Spain they were 40 euros and 30 euros, respectively.
France provided 58 million euros of its own funds for its crisis distillation, plus social security exemption for small and medium-sized wine companies in difficulties, plus 120 million euros for loans to winegrowers. Italy, with a different policy, earmarked 14.7 million for green harvesting, 14 million for crisis distillation, and 90 million for promotional aid to wineries, plus 69 million for investments in wineries and 120 million for restructuring, much higher amounts than France and Spain for structural rather than crisis measures.
Unión de Uniones considers that Spanish winegrowers suffered a major setback in the application of crisis measures in 2020 compared to other major EU producers, differing only in the private storage for which €16 million was spent, and now the Ministry needs to approve new measures that will give them security and perspective to overcome the new campaign.
