Today, the Minister for the Care of the Village, Milan Krkobabic, announced a new program of support for cooperatives in Serbia, which is worth half a billion dinars.
“We want to hear the right information from the field, no one can know the situation better than the cooperative members themselves and the people who work in the cooperatives – what is the situation, what are the challenges and what are the problems. cooperative members expect to be focused on the right projects “, said Krkobabić in Svilajnac, where he presented the program of support to cooperatives.
He said the program starts in the fall.
“We have just started working, we are young and the help of the Ministry meant a lot to us and accelerated the production process and entering the market,” said the director of the beekeeping cooperative “Svilamed”, Dragan Milosavljevic.
This newly established cooperative, which Krkokabic visited, received 7.5 million dinars from the program of financial support to cooperatives in 2021 for the purchase of equipment and machinery for beekeeping – 600 bee swarms, 300 plastic hives, self-propelled hive loader and other equipment. its 5.8 million dinars.
This year, the cooperative is participating in bee pasture with about 300 hives and the planned 3-4 tons of acacia honey, the same amount of sunflower honey and the expected income of 30,000-40,000 euros.
Academician Dragan Škorić, President of the Academic Board for the Village of SANU and Co-President of the National Team for the Revival of Rural Villages of Serbia, as well as a member of the National Team for the Revival of Rural Villages of Serbia, agroeconomist Milan Prostran also visited Svilajnac.
Škorić pointed out the importance of science and its application in practice, and emphasized that cooperatives are the backbone of the survival and development of the village.
“Serbian cooperatives have a perspective and in this time of severe global crisis, every small producer is important to us, and most of them will survive only with the help of the cooperative,” said Prostran.
Krkobabic also visited the old farming cooperative “Svilajnac”, which was awarded 15 million dinars from the same program in 2019 for the purchase of a grain dryer.
This cooperative, founded in 1897, has 34 cooperatives and 12 employees and is engaged in farming and poultry farming.
The investment financed by the non-refundable funds of the Ministry for the Care of the Village of Serbia in 2020 brought them a dryer with a capacity of 60 tons for drying cereals, primarily corn, and it was placed within a concrete silo. Depending on the needs, it dries between 500-700 tons of wet corn annually.
All production facilities are owned by the cooperative and are in the function of joint production. Slavoljub Petrovic, the acting director of this cooperative, thanked the minister for the visit and emphasized that the cooperative got more subcontractors by purchasing a dryer and is operating even more stably.
This year, half a billion dinars have been allocated for the program of financial support to cooperatives. In previous years, according to the public competition, newly formed agricultural and agricultural cooperatives were awarded non-refundable funds in the amount of up to 7.5 million dinars for business improvement.
Up to 15 million dinars per cooperative were set aside for old agricultural and agricultural cooperatives. Last year, the right to non-refundable funds under the same public competition had agricultural and agricultural cooperatives with predominant activities in the field of tourism, crafts and cooperatives whose founders are socially vulnerable groups, Beta reports.
