Promotion fund of the German agriculture and food industry

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Sales promotion fund of the German agriculture and food industry (sales fund)

State level Federation
position Institute of public right
Supervisory authority Federal Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection
founding 1969
by the law on the establishment of a central fund to promote sales in the German agriculture and food industry
Headquarters Bonn , North Rhine-Westphalia
Authority management Peter Krebs (Chairman of the Board of Management)
Servants 8th
Budget volume 125 million euros (2007)
Web presence www.absatzfonds.de

The German Agricultural and Food Sector's Sales Promotion Fund (in short: Sales Fund ) was founded in 1969 as a German public-law institution after the Sales Fund Act was passed, in order to improve the competitiveness and profitability of the German agricultural and food industry through central sales promotion. It was subject to the supervision of the Federal Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection . The institution was dissolved on May 31, 2011. This was preceded by a ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court , which recognized crucial parts of the regulations for financing the sales fund as incompatible with the Basic Law and thus void. (see also the section on legal issues ).

tasks

The purpose of the sales fund, as formulated in the law, was to centrally promote the sale and utilization of products from the German agricultural and food industry by opening up and maintaining markets at home and abroad. He should work towards improving the quality and safety of the products and, more recently, also take into account consumer, animal and environmental protection concerns. To carry out this task, he should use a central facility of the economy , which does community marketing for German goods , but does not itself market any goods for profit; the sales fund used the CMA for this purpose . To implement this task by promoting market transparency , he should use a special company, for which the Central Market and Price Reporting Office for Agriculture, Forestry and Nutritional Science GmbH , Bonn, was appointed.

The sales fund levied taxes on the manufacturing companies, which it had collected through the Federal Agency for Agriculture and Food from what are often so-called bottleneck companies (e.g. dairies, slaughterhouses, mills). In the product group of dairies / milk, the move was partly made by the authorities responsible in the federal states for levying the levy under the Milk and Fat Act. CMA and ZMP were mainly financed by the sales fund. Of the total expenditure of the sales fund of around 100 million euros annually, around 90% went to the CMA and around 10% to the ZMP.

organs

The sales fund had the organs

The board consisted of a full-time, executive board and two honorary board members elected by the board of directors. Members of the parliamentary groups and representatives of the following interest groups and organizations were represented on the administrative board:

There was a heated controversy in 2002 about the corresponding amendment to the Sales Fund Act by the red-green federal government to send animal, environmental and consumer protection groups, as these groups did not contribute to the financing of the Sales Fund.

Levies

From 1994 to 2009 the following tax amounts applied:

Companies liable to pay contributions Products Contribution rate in euros
Sugar factories per 1,000 kg of beet ingested 0.16
Mills per 1,000 kg of ground bread grain 0.48
Breweries per 1,000 kg of malt used 0.61
Fruits, vegetables, potatoes per 100 euros of goods picked up 0.40
Dairies per 1,000 kg of milk delivered 1.22
Egg packing stations per 1,000 wrapped eggs 0.30
Poultry slaughterhouses per 100 kg live weight 0.36
Slaughterhouses per beef 2.04
per pig 0.51
per sheep 0.30
Oil mills 1,000 kg of rapeseed / colza seeds 0.71
1,000 kg of sunflower seeds each 0.81
Flowers, ornamental plants and woody plants per unit of area used 0.06

Legal issues

In the legal sense, the contributions were temporary special charges . The Cologne Administrative Court questioned this special charge in 2006 and submitted it to the Federal Constitutional Court for review.

The problem was triggered in a chain reaction by a judgment of the ECJ from 2002.

  • This had forbidden CMA and sales fund to advertise German products with reference to the country of origin in the previous form, this discriminated against products from other EU countries.
  • By advertising all products of a type "eg milk", imported products are now also advertised. According to the Cologne Administrative Court, this could no longer be of group benefit.
  • The group-beneficial use of the money is in turn the prerequisite for the constitutional collection of a special levy from German manufacturers.

After the Cologne resolution was available, the Northern Germany Cooperative Association informed its members in a circular in August 2006 about the possibility of filing objections. The North German Cooperative Association represents an important part of the total revenue of the sales fund. Members of the GVN include Nordmilch with an estimated contribution volume of 4 million euros, the PHW group behind the Wiesenhof poultry brand , and most of the German pig farmers. After some of the contributors only paid conditional contributions, the sales fund had to hold back a substantial part of its funds as provisions in the event that it later had to repay them to these contributors. They were therefore no longer available for the CMA and ZMP to the usual extent.

According to DBV's answer to the Bundestag's Nutrition Committee on March 7, 2007, as of December 31, 2006, there were contradictions against the notifications of contributions from the sales fund amounting to approx. 37 million euros for 2006. This was nominally around 40% of the funds that were received. However, if you take into account the fact that the decision of the Cologne Administrative Court - because of which many so-called "bottleneck companies" objected to the notices - only became known in the second half of 2006, more than 75% of the volume of the premium income was contradicted, since the contribution notices are not p. a., but were created monthly or semi-annually.

With a judgment announced on February 3, 2009 based on the oral hearing on September 17, 2008, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the provisions of the Sales Fund Act since July 1, 2002 have been incompatible with the Basic Law and are void.

Other funds

In addition to the sales fund, there are two other funds for the product groups not managed by the sales fund, which, like the sales fund, are financed from special charges:

criticism

In a research report from the University of Hohenheim, Becker and Benner formulate a fundamental criticism of the prevailing community marketing and its financing. The sales fund finances the CMA, the central marketing organization of the German agricultural sector, with a large part of the funds received. According to Becker, the CMA's previous advertising efforts are unlikely to have contributed to promoting the sale of agricultural products and improving farmers' incomes. In other EU countries, too, the politicians and entrepreneurs involved in this are increasingly realizing that it is time to leave the beaten track in the area of ​​community marketing for agricultural products and food. In the Netherlands, for example, the discussion about more effective solutions has resulted in the Productschap for Cattle, Meat and Eggs (PVE) discontinuing the promotion of Dutch cattle and meat. If sales promotion campaigns are still running at all, then the meanwhile extremely financially strong companies in the meat industry do and finance it themselves. The business group is now limited to image advertising and consumer information. Ms. Antje, known as a symbolic figure especially in Dutch cheese advertising, has not yet retired. The Productschap Gartenbau also finances intensive domestic and export advertising for ornamental plants as well as fruit and vegetables. The funds used come primarily from parafiscal industry levies. In addition, numerous foreign organizations (e.g. Sopexa / F, ICE / I, Danske Slagterier / DK, AHDB / GB) are active in sales promotion. Their sales promotion budgets are mainly generated from state funds and / or tax-like charges and / or voluntary contributions from the economy.

In view of the largely undiminished advertising pressure from foreign sales promotion organizations, it seems nonsensical to completely forego countermeasures. However, the common central agricultural marketing would have to be reformed from within. The reformed organization should focus on promoting exports. The financing should be based on the foreign model from the agricultural budget. This would relieve the burden on German agriculture, which is facing ever tougher EU and global competition. The future farms in agriculture, which already cultivate relatively large land capacities and livestock and thus have to transfer considerable amounts of money to the sales fund, would have significantly better development opportunities in the further development of their farms. In the upcoming reform of community marketing, it should not be forgotten to subject the export promotion organization left over from the CMA to permanent and systematic marketing controlling using the most modern methods, so that in the future export promotion company there are no grievances and undesirable developments as in the future make the former CMA wide. In addition, a continuous and intensive observation of the competition should take place in order to be able to react promptly and appropriately to sales promotion activities of foreign competitors.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sales Fund Activity Report 2007 (PDF; 929 kB) accessed on February 24, 2009.
  2. ↑ § 1 Law on the Dissolution and Liquidation of the Establishment Promotion Fund of the German Agriculture and Food Industry , Article 1 G. v. May 25, 2011 (BGBl. I p. 950)
  3. ↑ a b BVerfG, judgment of February 3, 2009 , Az. 2 BvL 54/06, full text.
  4. ↑ Section 2, Paragraph 1 of the Sales Fund Act
  5. ↑ § 2 Paragraph 2 of the Sales Fund
  6. ↑ § 2 Paragraph 3 AbsFondsG
  7. ↑ afZ - Allgemeine Fleischer Zeitung, January 28, 2004, p. 2.
  8. ↑ a b Lebensmittel Zeitung 37 of September 15, 2006, p. 28.
  9. ↑ Deß: Sales fund reform a further step towards eco-dictatorship. Agra-Europe (AgE), Volume 43, No. 10 from March 4, 2002
  10. ^ VG Köln, decision of May 18, 2006 , Az. 13 K 2230/05, full text.
  11. ↑ ECJ, judgment of November 5, 2002 , Az. C-325/00, full text.
  12. ↑ Bundestag hearing on March 7, 2007. www.bundestag.de, archived from the original on July 7, 2007 ; accessed on February 4, 2014 .
  13. ^ Tilman Becker, Eckhard Benner: On the problem of the indication of origin in regional marketing. (PDF; 208 kB) In: Hohenheim Agricultural Economic Working Reports. November 2006, accessed on October 20, 2019 (work report No. 1 of the University of Hohenheim).
  14. ^ Tilman Becker: The CMA on the test bench. (PDF; 392 kB) In: Hohenheim Agricultural Economic Working Reports. November 2006, accessed on October 20, 2019 (work report No. 14 of the University of Hohenheim).
  15. ↑ F. Mühlbauer: Do we still need the CMA in the future? (PDF; 55 KB) Weihenstephan University of Applied Sciences, accessed on October 13, 2018 . .