Northern regional official says farmers should be paid for ecosystem services, backs cooperatives

Paulo Ramalho, vice-president of the northern regional development commission CCDR Norte, argued that farming matters well beyond food production, citing its role in rural cohesion, biodiversity and wildfire prevention. He said farmers should be paid for the ecosystem services they provide and called for stronger cooperatives and producer organisations to help small family holdings gain scale and market clout. He noted that 1,090 of roughly 2,000 approved young-farmer applications nationally come from the North, 397 of them from Trás-os-Montes. He spoke at a young farmers' meeting in Macedo de Cavaleiros on 23 October.