Lisbon, Nov. 27, 2025 (Lusa) - The Portuguese prime minister has argued that there should be "a fair balance" between environmental values and the sustainability needs of the agricultural sector, considering it incomprehensible and even masochistic to propose the opposite.
Luís Montenegro closed the Congress commemorating the 50th year of the Confederation of Portuguese Farmers (CAP) on Wednesday, which took place at the Pavilhão de Portugal in Lisbon, where he praised the spirit of this organisation.
"There is one thing that is true and I recognise it, the spirit is always positive and always forthright, and when the spirit is positive and forthright there is loyalty and a purpose to achieve results," he said, after meeting on Wednesday afternoon with another social partner, the UGT trade union, at the PM's official residence in São Bento.
It was also from this perspective of conciliation that Montenegro framed the presence of the Minister of Agriculture, José Manuel Fernandes, and the Minister for the Environment and Energy, Maria Graça Carvalho, together in the front row.
"The government's guiding principle is the belief that agriculture is fundamental to the country's economic strategy," he argued.
The Prime Minister regretted that, for some years, "concepts" had been generated at national and European level that there should be such "imposition of environmental and health rules" that the activities of agricultural and livestock producers were "unsustainable".
"And they still had to impose on themselves and their people the consumption of products that others placed on their own markets, not complying with the rules they imposed on themselves," he criticised, receiving applause from the audience.
For the Prime Minister, this perspective was "absolutely incomprehensible, such is the masochism it entails".
"We have always maintained, for Portugal and for Europe, that the right balance between the principles of environmental sustainability, the principles of a successful energy transition, and the principles of health regulations, can be reconciled with the various policies," he said.
For Montenegro, the Ministry for the Environment and Energy "must reconcile with the Ministry of Agriculture and must, as it is doing in Portugal, build consensual or agreed solutions between the two".
"Often they start from some tension, some divergence, but they have an obligation to reach common ground, they also have an obligation to reach agreement, a result that can have an impact on greater productive capacity and the protection of what belongs to everyone," he stressed.
Without responding directly to the warnings issued the day before by the country's president about the "legal and administrative obstacles" that make the arrival of Recovery and Resilience Programme funds to the final beneficiaries "too slow", Montenegro conceeded that "not everything always runs as quickly" as the Government would like.
"We are currently at a critical moment in defining the next multiannual financial framework, which overlaps greatly with the expectations of Portuguese agriculture. In the near future, we will need to further strengthen our dialogue so that we can arrive at final solutions that do not harm Portuguese agriculture, do not harm European agriculture as a whole, but Portuguese agriculture in particular," he said.
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