There is headwind from the FDP to the green-led Agriculture Ministry’s plans for an “animal welfare cent” as a price surcharge for meat in the supermarket. “There will be no new taxes or tax increases with the FDP. Cem Özdemir’s proposal ignores the actual needs of farmers,” said FDP parliamentary group deputy Christoph Meyer to the dpa. “The proposal would not help agriculture either, because the tax revenue would go to the federal budget without being tied to its use.”
The Ministry of Agriculture has developed a concept for an excise tax on meat and meat products for the “Tierwohlcent”, as can be seen from a paper available to the dpa. This is about an animal welfare tax on animal products in supermarkets that was recommended by a commission several years ago. As a guide, the committee had mentioned a surcharge of 40 cents per kilo of meat and sausage. The background is that the costs for converting animal husbandry could rise to up to 3.6 billion euros per year by 2040.
However, there was support for the planned tax from agriculture: “If we want to convert animal husbandry and continue to eat meat from Germany, we cannot avoid this option. This is not possible without an animal welfare tax. The market does not regulate this on its own,” said the federal chairman of the rural agriculture working group, Martin Schulz, to the newspapers of the Funke media group. The farmers’ association also spoke out in favor of the “animal welfare cent” in the Funke newspapers and called for the amount of the levy to be recalculated due to high inflation.
