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Prime Minister Juha Sipilä: European Union must take climate leadership role

The U.S. Government has announced that the country will pull out of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. According to the agreement, the earliest time when the withdrawal could take place is after three years from the entry into force of the agreement, that is, in November 2019.

“Well begun is half done”, five famous words of Aristotle. Interestingly enough, the sentence is found in his work Politics. Is well begun half done a fitting guideline even today, in our efforts to achieve the Digital Single Market, asks Anne Berner, Finland's Minister of Transport and Communications

The European Union must take a more robust position in defense of free trade. On Wednesday the European Commission published its Reflection Paper on Globalisation. The paper discusses how to harness the benefits of globalisation while defending the values and interests of the European Union, with the aim of achieving sustainable growth and boosting employment. Read Prime Minister Juha Sipilä's column.

The European Commission yesterday, 26 April, published its reflection paper on the social dimension of Europe. This discusses the EU’s various options for the future from the perspective of the social dimension. Prime Minister Juha Sipilä's thoughts on the paper.

In support of the ongoing discussion on simplification of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the Nordic and Baltic countries Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden introduced a list of simplification proposals for CAP. Consisting of a list of 67 concrete measures with objective to help the farmers’ work and ease the administrative burden, the proposal reflects the principles of subsidiarity, proportionality and sound management.

In March, for Finnish farmers as everywhere, spring heralds planning and fieldwork. Cultivation plans are finalised and parcel data are declared as the baseline data for support applications. Every spring the complex support framework leads to complications in the planning, frustrating the farmers and causing unnecessary fears of making mistakes.