Subsidies must be given to efficient farmers

The Ministry of Agriculture and Food Industry failed to reach last year’s goal of offering small and medium farms access to subsidy funds. The statement was made by Ion Perju, author of the study “The farming subsidy fund, managed by the Agency for Payments and Interventions in Agriculture”, released on Thursday by IDIS-Viitorul. Perju said that only 21.4% of the 400 million lei, the total subsidy fund in 2010, went to small and medium farms. He claims that last year’s Subsidy Regulation was bureaucratic and the criteria of evaluating farmers were ambiguous. The subsidy cap in some branches limited investments in the agrifood sector. The conditions of the subsidy regulation weren’t respected by many of the applicants. Perju proposed that the new regulation for 2011 dropped some absurd conditions for potential beneficiaries of subsidies, including that of having to be member of a specialized association and obligatory professional training. The business plan must be required only in the case of investment subsidies. He thinks that the Regulation must be simplified so that applicants could better understand it. Alexandru Slusari, president of Uniagroproiect, stated that subsidies must be offered to efficient farmers, regardless if they are big or small, without discrimination. He mentioned that the Agency for Payments and Interventions in Agriculture must pay more attention to the impact of subsidies, the results of farmers who receive support from the state. Valentina Badrajan, executive director of the Millennium Challenge Fund in Moldova, stressed the need to coordinate the subsidization with support from other projects like the Millennium Challenges to create the post-harvesting infrastructure. This would boost the efficiency of support and the results of farmers. Liviu Gumoschi, executive director of the World Bank’s project Rural Investments and Services, said the World Bank and other institutions financed the development of business plans for subsidy beneficiaries. He added that business plans were needed not only for obtaining money, but for increasing the awareness and responsibility of farmers. The project of the Budget for 2011 allots only 25 million lei for farming subsidies, 150 million less than in 2010. The draft Subsidy Regulation was developed and is nearly complete.