Minister of European Integration Tanja Miščević said today at the agribusiness conference “Grow up – the strength of the country” that the alignment in the field of agriculture and rural development, food safety and fisheries cost a significant amount of money, which should not represent an expense but an investment.
Serbia had said at the beginning that it was interested in investing in production and development as a strategic branch, Miščević explained.
As she said, an important step in all of this is the IPARD funds, which are not new for countries negotiating membership, since it relies on the SAPARD fund, but it has been improved.
She pointed out that Chapter 13, which concerns agricultural policy, was open.
“Our colleagues from the Ministry of Agriculture are working on the preparation of a fisheries strategy, which is a plan to close this chapter”, Miščević said.
As she explained, we have the opening benchmarks for Chapter 11, which concerns agriculture and rural development.
“Before the member states, those benchmarks represent an assessment of whether we have fulfilled them in order to move on”, she explained.
As for Chapter 12, which refers to food safety, veterinary and phytosanitary policy, she says that Minister of Agriculture Jelena Tanasković is working diligently on it, which means that the preparation of all the necessary documents, and many other issues that are a big challenge is underway.
As she said, “our grand plan is to have fully presented documents by the end of the year, coordinated with civil society and the European Commission in order to send them to Brussels.”
Jasmina Miljković from the IPARD unit of the Ministry of Agriculture said that the challenges related to IPARD were constant, that there were many of them but that they kept managing to solve them on the fly.
As she explained, due to frequent fluctuations in the market and rising inflation, users of IPARD funds become insecure, those who received a decision on project approval did not know whether to implement the investment.
“Our idea is to relax the procedure itself through the IPARD 3 programme. Whenever we can relax the system and make it easier for users and help them, we do it”, said Miljković.
Director of the Serbian Export Credit and Insurance Agency (AOFI) Dejan Vukotić pointed out that agricultural insurance was an important matter.
As he explained, “we have to learn from the mistakes of our neighbours” because, as he said, Croatia “wasted the first two years after accessing the IPARD funds”.
Also, he added that it was necessary to find an appropriate mechanism in order to find ways to use the funds.
In the second panel, the readiness of farmers to use funds, the role of the state and subsidies in the development of agriculture, as well as the impact of price movements on the stock exchanges on the market of agricultural production were discussed.
The participants also referred to this year’s budget of the Ministry of Agriculture, which is at a historical maximum.
Source: Tanjug
