New funds from the European Union could soon be available to farmers from Serbia because the IPARD 3 program is being prepared, but considering that so far only 10 percent of the available amount has been paid to farmers in our country from the still current IPARD 2 program, new millions will be waiting for some time.
Namely, through IPARD 2, the European program for assistance to farmers, Serbia had 175 million euros at its disposal this year, and farmers could apply through three measures – for investments in farm property, investment in physical assets related to product processing and marketing, as well as diversification of agricultural holdings and business development.
Due to the complicated procedure, but also the insufficient number of employees in the Agency for Agrarian Payments, which has been one of the main problems since the beginning when accreditation started in 2014, Serbia has currently contracted just over 26%, according to official EU data.
A few days ago, the Minister of Agriculture, Branislav Nedimovic, as a guest on RTS, said that we are negotiating IPARD 3, a new line of assistance planned for the period from 2022 to 2027, and that the EU will allocate significantly more money than in the previous program – 288 million euros. In order to get that money, Serbia will first have to pay everything it received for IPARD 2, because that is the rule.
This will be difficult because it is late from the beginning, accreditation started in 2014, and the first public call was announced in 2017.
Although EU regulations require that money that has not been spent by the end of the year be returned to EU funds, Serbia has been “looked through the fingers” in previous years, and has been given extended deadlines.
However, even with that, our country is quite late in paying. The situation this year is such that the funds planned for this year and the remaining 15 million euros from last year must be spent, which means that 45 million euros should be paid to farmers by the end of the year so that the money does not return to where it came from.
This is almost impossible because, according to data from the EU, six to seven million euros are paid to farmers in Serbia every year, so it is to be expected that the EU will be asked to extend the deadline this year as well.
All funds will have to be spent by 2023, and what could possibly speed up the payment is the introduction of an advance payment. For that, however, legal changes are necessary in order to enable the Agency to pay part of the funds to the farmers in advance.
Agrarian analyst Vojislav Stankovic says for Danas that it is a bit “stretched” on a long run because the state currently has other priorities, such as a pandemic and investment in infrastructure. He says that the priority should be the processing and food industry, on which our purchasing power and exports depend.
Stankovic also explains why money from European funds is “spent” slowly.
“We do not have challenging and quality programs, and the problem is that the money is given to farmers retroactively. They have to finance the whole project themselves and then only when they finish do they get the funds and that is why it goes like that. The local self-government does not have enough money to finance it and that is a problem,” Stankovic points out.
Serbia is not the only one that has a problem meeting the strict EU criteria. There were also a lot of problems with funds for farmers in Croatia in the beginning, when they started in 2006, as part of the SAPARD program.
“When we started in SAPARD, we had 33 million euros at our disposal, of which we paid 48 percent, however, a little later through IPARD we received a little more money, 246 million euros, of which almost 70 percent was contracted and paid,”says Sasa Bukovac, assistant director of the Croatian Agency for Payments in Agriculture, Fisheries and Rural Development.
The shortcomings of the IPARD program from their point of view, he points out, are excessive controls, extensive field controls that could last for several days, if, for example, it is a matter of control during construction.
“Besides that, excessive administrative controls, but also the fact that the whole system is expensive, but also long procedures for obtaining approval from the EC services,” Bukovac points out.
He says that the deadline prescribed for issuing decisions on the allocation of funds in Croatia was from 90 to 98 days, and the real time of issuance varied from 85 to as much as 1,500 days, for those measures in which it was necessary to conduct public procurement.
At a later stage, after Croatia joined the EU, as much as 2.3 billion euros were available to them for agriculture from the EAFRD program.
As a result of using that money, as Bukovac said, presenting data to journalists from Serbia, 248,015 contracted projects, and the percentage of paid funds exceeded 76 percent.
EU public procurement rules
Within the IPARD 3 program, Serbia has opted for seven measures and the only additional in relation to IPARD 2 are investments in public infrastructure in rural areas. This measure (Measure 6) should be financed entirely from EU funds, and the only condition that will be insisted on is that European rules for public procurement must be applied, Danas reports.
