Help for farmers?

“Overnight stay euro”: Hotel industry appalled

(Bild: Patrick Daxenbichler)

Josef Moosbrugger (ÖVP), President of the Chamber of Agriculture, has raised eyebrows with a proposal. The 58-year-old from Vorarlberg, who is a dairy farmer himself, would like to levy an "overnight euro" in Alpine regions to benefit mountain farmers. In this context, Moosbrugger pointed out the difficult situation for many farms in the Alpine region. The hoteliers' association vehemently rejects this demand.

"Agriculture receives by far the most funding from the EU's Multiannual Financial Framework (...). To then want to take a basketful of money from the coffers of another sector, that is quite a strong piece", criticized Walter Veit, President of the Austrian Hotel Association (ÖHV), in a press release on Friday. 

Demand is "unrealistic"
In the view of the hoteliers' association, the demand is "unrealistic". "If the farmers mow the mountain pastures for us, we also want the hay. And we are happy to sell it back to them," illustrated Veit.

Moosbrugger insisted to several newspapers on Thursday that agricultural businesses should share in the profits of tourism. "We have a cultivated land, not some monotonous landscape as we know it in some regions in Europe. This cultivated land is precisely the result of family farming," said the President of the Chamber of Agriculture in the "Presse".

The question arises as to what would happen to tourism in Austria if this cultivated land no longer existed, he argued. Moosbrugger also told the "Oberösterreichische Nachrichten" newspaper that a kind of overnight euro or similar would be needed to preserve the farms.