MEPs urge special status for rural areas

Date: 04/06/1998

By Rory Watson

THE European Parliament is pressing for a clearer distinction to be made between rural and urban aid programmes when the EU overhauls its regional, social and agricultural policies.

The Parliament's regional affairs committee fears that in the absence of any clear dividing line, the rural environment will be at a disadvantage in the increasingly fierce competition for EU funding.

The proposal is one of many fundamental changes to the European Commission's Agenda 2000 programme for the reform of pivotal internal policies which the committee has endorsed and which will be examined by the full Parliament in the early autumn.

In a bid to streamline the existing cumbersome arrangements, the Commission has suggested that EU aid to regions undergoing economic change, declining rural areas and urban centres hit by poverty and unemployment should be grouped in one category.

But this approach has been strongly criticised by German Green MEP Elisabeth Schroedter, the author of the committee's report, who dismisses the suggestion as having “no internal logic”. She insists that the structural problems of these regions are very different in nature and require specially tailored solutions.

“Even the selection criteria for the individual regions differ radically. Targeted intervention is being sacrificed to simplification, and this is unacceptable,” she complained.

“Given the fact that 80&percent; of EU citizens live in towns and cities, this merging of objectives puts the rural environment at a distinct disadvantage. The Commission's figures for the percentage breakdown between urban and rural population support this: 11&percent; for industrial population centres plus 2&percent; for towns and cities compared with only 5&percent; for the rural environment.”

MEPs are also concerned that under the present proposals, which would see rural development policies financed from the agricultural rather than regional fund, local and regional partnerships would be undermined and the Parliament's own powers of democratic control weakened.

Dismissing the Commission's scheme as “unsatisfactory”, the regional affairs committee is arguing that industrial and rural areas should each be given their own status with specific eligibility categories, objectives and financial quotas.

Such an arrangement, it suggests, “would be an acceptable compromise to ensure specific and guaranteed support for the rural environment, without jeopardising the need to strike a balance between town and country, on the one hand, and the democratic quality of structural policy on the other”.

The committee's report lays particular emphasis on partnerships and on the need to involve local and regional authorities, as well as employers and trade unions, in drawing up and implementing the various aid programmes. This, it stresses, would be particularly crucial during the change-over late next year from the existing to the new arrangements.

The MEPs are also critical of the Commission's proposal to hold back 10&percent; of the 275 billion ecu of regional, social and agricultural structural aid likely to be available between 2000 and 2006. Under the plan, the money would be kept in a reserve fund and handed out to countries able to point to concrete results from earlier funding.

Parliamentarians warn that the proposal could “involve arbitrary judgements and increased bureaucracy” and have declared their opposition to any move to withhold payments to countries which proved unable to spend the finance they had been allocated.

The committee is demanding that greater attention be paid to the role of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are considered to be one of the main engines of job creation, in the reformed funds. It fears that finance now targeted at SMEs could be hit in the drive to simplify the present arrangements.

It would also like greater support to be given to the new model fund designed to promote innovative programmes, recommending that the 1&percent; of the overall total now on the table should be increased to 3&percent;.

On the external front, Schroedter's report raises the possibility of increased cooperation with third countries by investigating the setting up of joint funds.

It also goes further than the Commission in arguing for “a specific and permanent financial instrument” in the structural funds to help the applicant countries in central and eastern Europe prepare for EU membership.