This week Hanover is the performance showcase for the global agricultural machinery and equipment industry. After all, the city is hosting an Agritechnica that outstrips all former exhibitions in size and international nature on an area of 390,000 m². This takes us up to the limits of even these largest exhibition grounds in the world – 24 halls and 17% more exhibitors. I am particularly glad that this growth to 2,700 exhibitors has been largely brought about by making Agritechnica even more international. We have 25% more international exhibitors than in 2009, for the first time just as many as exhibitors from Germany, the best from 48 nations. This proves that in view of the major challenges, agriculture is not a regional matter, not a national matter, nor is it a European matter, but instead a global affair.
Modern technologies, such as the industry integrates into its machines in fascinating diversity, are being developed throughout the world in a competitive environment that like a greenhouse is bringing forth new findings with unimagined dynamism. The tests conducted at our Test Center in Gross Umstadt with which we check the fitness for use of new agricultural machinery and equipment demonstrate this fascinating progress, whether in efficient and at the same time climate-protecting drive systems, exact steering systems, precision sensors or smart fleet management systems, to mention just a few of the items. Agritechnica proves more than ever before that international technological exchange fed by practical experience and scientific impetus is a win-win situation for everyone involved. This intelligent exchange, including the secured interfaces of machines among each other, regardless of the manufacturer and where they are installed, is just as indispensable as free trade with goods, trade with agricultural products, and free trade with agricultural machinery and equipment. Any party seeking to restrict access to innovative technologies harms itself, its agricultural sector, its manufacturers and ultimately the consumers most of all. Why? Because such parties cut themselves off from the fruits of this international task sharing, from the stimulating competition to find the best solution.
An open market of ideas, the use of comparative cost benefits and free trade in order to enable worldwide division of tasks, these are the concepts for the future that make the world’s largest exhibition Agritechnica possible, even indispensable. I therefore extend a most cordial welcome to our international guests, from the Belts and the fertile Pampas of North and South America, from Europe and Asia, from the Siberian plains and the loess steppes of China through to the wetland landscapes of India.
Dear Dr. Garbers, Chairman of the VDMA Agricultural Machinery Association and our trusty Agritechnica partner, today represents the crowning success of our many years of inspiring cooperation in a spirit of trust and confidence. My thanks go to you and your colleagues. I would also like to thank you, dear Dr. v. Fritsch as Chairman of the Board of Deutsche Messe AG for making it possible for us to develop further an Agritechnica exhibition that reaches the limits of capacity at these innovative and clearly laid out exhibition grounds in the heart of Europe. Finally, I should like to thank you too, dear Frau v. Rhade, DLG Project Manager of Agritechnica, together with your fantastic team who have stimulated this growth and positioned it professionally in 26 exhibition halls.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Agritechnica is more than the world’s most important collection of technical masterpieces made of steel coupled with filigree electronic and hydraulic systems. This week, Hanover is the Davos of the agricultural sector, the place where agricultural masterminds, economic leaders and business-minded farmers, engineers and academics meet. The Davos of agriculture does not lie up in the metaphorical clouds in an Alpine setting, but instead down on the plains where hands-on problems solutions can be viewed on 39 hectares.
Those masterminds who want to think ahead ought to know where they stand. Corporate news from the agricultural machinery industry worldwide report record results, clearly double-digit growth rates, components that are becoming scarce due to demand, delivery times that are becoming longer due to workloads.
These pioneering masterminds meet customers, business-minded farmers and entrepreneurs, whose demand continues unchecked. They encounter high agricultural prices, breakdown of the investment backlogs that existed in individual regions, positive expectations of the future, but especially a programme of capital goods that takes quality of work and efficiency into a new dimension. To sum it all up, we are experiencing a sunny summer’s day in the industry, and that in the middle of November.
Continuing with this image, if we consider our macro-economic environment, this November has everything typically familiar in the northern hemisphere – fog stopping us from seeing clearly, sudden and violent storms that shake governments and in some cases blow them away, a frosty world in which feel-good hormones are in short supply. Rates of public indebtedness on this side and on the far side of the Atlantic, within and outside the Euro zone, lead creditors to doubt the ability of entire states, important states, to repay principal and interest. Banks are sucked up in the wake of this. A financial crisis that affects the real economy appears possible, as we have learned from the experience of 2008 that brought our economy to a sudden stop, from which the agricultural machinery industry has only just recovered. Within Europe, this setting for which there are regrettably no empirical values meets with structures, institutions and individuals whose many-voiced decision-making processes do not always inspire maximum confidence. Is Europe the end of an illusion? A failure of institutions and common currency?
Ladies and Gentlemen, do Europe’s critics really know what they are saying when they speak of failure, nationalist charlatans, attention-grabbing commentators, experts without genuine alternatives? There is no realistic alternative to this Europe, whose process of unification began by hands extended across the ruins of World War II. There is no more supportive foundation for freedom, democratic rights and a prospering economy. No other common voice in a world of shifting political weights.
We are sitting here and are able to be pleased about the international nature of Agritechnica, the developed markets, especially towards the east. I wonder where our sector would be today without a European Union, whether German reunification would have been possible, whether our eastern and south-eastern neighbours would have been able to go through this headlong development during the past two decades without the goal of becoming a part of this democratic and prospering Europe, without cohesion and structural funds. Ladies and Gentlemen, Europe is and remains a strategic vision for which it is worth fighting, particularly and especially for European agribusiness. However, this community has flaws in the weave, in the structure of its decision-making processes, in the fiscal and financial policy of its Euro countries. It is worrying that these faults were known long before the crisis. A shortfall of political force – for which there were many reasons – led to the famous “mess” in which we now find ourselves. Only now do we see willingness to take overdue decisions. This is a lesson to us: The Euro crisis turns the spotlight on the consequences of not identifying and solving problems with the necessary realism. These problems will certainly force their way back onto the agenda and then with considerable collateral damage.
What now sounds like a platitude has a great deal to do with our sector too. Just a week or so ago the seven billionth world citizen first saw the light of day, 12 years after the six billionth predecessor. This child is not only hopefully a great joy to its parents, it also points to the greatest challenge of our century. In just a few decades 70% more food will be needed, together with climate-protecting and probably also biogenic alternatives for energy. The shortage of fertile arable land, scarce and therefore expensive foods, new climate-related restrictions, limited resources – wherever one looks on our earth, this analysis is just as clear as were the structural deficits of a European currency at the time. And we are acting in a similar fashion. Just as carelessly as we allowed the state quota and indebtedness to become inflated at the time, today we are handling fertile arable land equally thoughtlessly. Expanding settlement of land, sometimes inefficient bioenergy programmes with doubtful capacity to achieve their goals but secured returns, restrictive access to innovations that could positively influence the productivity of agricultural land, weakened agricultural research resources due to understaffing and underfunding, a complex system of state subsidies borne more by wishes than by transfer of incomes, but in fact also representing payment for not using the natural potentials of a location.
The current greening proposals made by the Commission serve to justify these grant allocations. Throughout Europe, from Sicily to the North Cape, they pursue the goal of giving up the primacy of food production for a uniform share of arable land. This is only the latest link in policy justifications that turn out to be what they actually are – placebos for tax payers/voters, and looking at the Euro crisis they are not so different from the gifts for public service workers or pensioners made at the time, one or the other prestige project that we are still paying for today. So that you do not misunderstand me, an agricultural system that does not treat its natural resources sustainably has no prospects for the future. However, reducing agriculture to maintaining biodiversity, to biotic and abiotic nature conservation, neglects the need to produce sufficient quantities of food. In recent months North Africa has shown us how drastically such noble objectives lose significance if the breadbasket is no longer sufficiently filled. And for precisely this reason, because nature conservation is essential for our future viability, we must not let it come to this.
We must make nature conservation measurable, just like the positive and negative external effects of agricultural production. We need validated findings in order to be able to achieve nature conservation goals efficiently too. We should not subject ourselves to the simple quality-based slogan that more nature conservation is always good. Already today Europe imports more agricultural products than it exports. In virtual terms almost three times Germany’s arable farming land area is cultivated beyond the boundaries of Europe for this purpose. A further extensive farming initiative in Europe, driven by environmental goals, would have to be compensated by more comprehensive production outside Europe’s borders. Regrettably, the current discussion in Europe blanks out the question of whether locations elsewhere that are much more valuable on ecological or climatic grounds have to be used for production, in the same way that it ignores the effects on food prices.
Just as clear contours emerge when the November fog lifts, this Agritechnica 2011 opens up more viable prospects. Not self-limitation, not new consumer patterns which nobody knows how to assert globally, only the keeping open of options for our troubled planet with its scarce resources forms the realistic concept for the future. Modern technologies and innovations in agricultural machinery, in breeding, in tending crops and keeping them healthy, and not least new findings in land and crop management are the core components of sustainable development. Technical progress, as can be seen hands-on in Hanover this week, technical progress that inspires shining eyes and can be grasped intellectually, technical progress as the fruit of free minds is the necessary prerequisite for mastering the great challenges of a dynamically growing world.
Technical progress is like a quantum leap, progress that makes it possible to harvest more and yet minimise the drain on natural resources. This is progress that engineers have imagined and developed in recent years and are presenting here. They are the true labourers in the vineyard, in the green pastures of the Lord. They enable us to master these challenges sustainably, in other words ensuring social as well as ecological compatibility and at the same time resource-efficiently.
Progress can only be realised if it enjoys acceptance in society. In many areas of agriculture we are experiencing fundamental scepticism among the non-agricultural population regarding technical developments in agriculture, in the cowsheds and piggeries, in bioenergy, regarding modern plant cultivation production systems.
Each one of us, as the most credible ambassador of what we do, has an extremely personal communication mandate here, the farmer through the open window of his off-road vehicle, as well as the representatives of innovative agricultural machinery products. Modern agriculture is not the problem, but instead the solution. We should not only put the message across courageously, but should also demonstrate our sustainability. Sustainability of farms can be measured three-dimensionally. Challenging indicators exist for this. What is measurable can be improved – technical progress helps here too.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the crisis of currencies because certain tasks were not performed in time shows us that we need a master plan for “Agribusiness 2020” today.
• We should define the objectives of agricultural production in 10 years realistically and measurably, goals of feeding, energy and material alternatives, as well as biotic and abiotic conservation of resources.
• When defining these goals we should leave behind our European introspection and be aware of the global responsibility of our favoured location for agricultural production.
• We should leave only those tools in the political toolbox that can reach these goals measurably and thus efficiently.
• We should review whether we have taken all the measures to promote technologies and enable their use if they have been tested on a scientific basis and found to be safe and at the same time serve the goal of food security.
• We should invest in knowledge and skills, the only goods that can be reproduced, in other words in research, from the basics rights through to applications, as well as in transferring knowledge into practice.
Dear Minister Aigner, it is a great pleasure and particular honour for us to be able to welcome you here today to the opening of Agritechnica. A few hours ago, you were still at the European Agricultural Council, I fear in the lowlands of balancing the interests of the EU 27. I would like to see a similar kind of master plan for the start of the further development of European agricultural policy over the next decade. In 2020 we will be asked about how and why we acted today. It would be good if we could point to a filled global breadbasket, achieved through an innovative agriculture that, because it was innovative, was also able to be ecologically and socially responsible. How good, we shall say, because from whom else should we expect a bail-out otherwise that not only mastered insolvencies, but could also halt gigantic migration streams, migration streams to the still full food tables?
Ladies and Gentlemen, agriculture with its foothill areas, especially together with agricultural machinery and equipment, is faced with great global tasks, from feeding people to sustainability and to equally balanced stakeholding in the welfare of our planet. This is a fascinating task. As Agritechnica 2011 shows, we have the means to do this in our hands. Carpe diem!
