Farm scheme delays criticized

Date: 24/01/02

By David Cronin

LONG delays in implementing the flagship farm support scheme for the ten candidate states in central and eastern Europe have been strongly criticised in a new report.

Written by German Socialist Willi Görlach for the European Parliament's agriculture committee, it finds that only about €30 million flowed into those countries between the start of the Special Accession Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development (SAPARD) in 1999 and the end of last year.

This was a fraction of the €530 million per year earmarked for the programme for 2000 to 2006.

The scheme, says Görlach, is 'poorly organised'. He adds that it is 'regrettable that a project launched with such great expectations as SAPARD is for the most part still not up and running'.

To date, only half of the potential beneficiaries - Bulgaria, Estonia, Slovenia, Lithuania and Latvia - have received any of the allocation.

Görlach says that the decision to give states the 'arduous task' of sketching out the projects they wish to have funded, then of managing them independently of Brussels, was 'sound at first sight', but argues it has meant 'valuable time being lost'.

He accepts the Commission's view that aid would primarily have gone to large-scale farming projects if SAPARD were managed in Brussels.

But he believes this could have been avoided if responsibilities for different aspects of it had been divided between the Commission and authorities in the ten countries.

Gregor Kreuzhuber, spokesman for Farm Commissioner Franz Fischler, agreed that the structures for implementing SAPARD are 'cumbersome' but said they are needed to ensure that taxpayers' money is spent correctly. He claimed one benefit is that countries are held accountable and EU funds are being handled by specially trained staff. Its rules also make it possible for money to be clawed back if irregularities arise, he explained.

Görlach wants a complementary programme to SAPARD to safeguard jobs in the states' agricultural sectors, saying this should be partly modelled on the Links Between Actions for the Development of the Rural Economy scheme (LEADER), which applies to the EU's existing members.

Long delays in implementing the flagship farm support scheme for the ten candidate states in Central and Eastern Europe have been strongly criticised in a new report, written for the European Parliament's agriculture committee.

http://ec.europa.eu/comm/agriculture/external/enlarge/index_en.htm http://ec.europa.eu/comm/agriculture/external/enlarge/index_en.htm

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