ROMANIA: Romania Risks Losing 25 pc of European Subventions in Agriculture

APIA announced Brussels that it would try to solve defficiencies signalled by European Commissioners. The European Commission (EC) may launch a warning to Romania, within a report that may be published today, for problems signalled in agriculture, especially because of defficiencyies found at the Agency of Payments responsible with the development of the European funds, Rompres informs.

The text of the warning letter addressed to the Romanian authorities and an avaluation of the audit missions that have checked, within the last months, the manner of functioning of the Agency of Payments and Interventions in Agriculture (APIA), will be presented by the European Commissioner for Agriculture, Mariann Fischer Boel, in the reunion of the Commission. Whether the EC should consider that the safeguarding clause on agriculture should be activated against Romania and Bulgaria, a quarter of the European subventions for agriculture allocated for 2007 could be lost.

The European Funds destinated to Romania in 2007 for direct payments at hectare reach EUR 440 M, which means that penalties will be applied for approximately EUR 100 mln.

Yet, APIA announced Brussels that it would try to solve defficiencies signalled by European Commissioners within the audit missions until November 30, 2007 in order to avoid the enforcement of penalties.

Furthermore, the General Manager of APIA, Dan Gherghelas, requested the Siveco - ABG Sterproject consortium, the one that implemented the informatical system, the realisation, until October 30, 2007 of the last modulus for the Integrated System of Administration and Control, the one of authorising and calculating payments, given the fact that its testing will start on October 20. A problem noticed by European experts in the case of Romania showed that there are about 400,000 superposed requests, in the total of 1.244 million submitted by farmers, for payments on a surface of over 9 million hectares.

Sources of the Agricultural and Rural Development Bureau of the EC declared recently for the Bulgarian press that applying the safeguarding clause on agriculture against Romania and Bulgaria may not be on the agenda of today’s reunion of the EC. The mention regarding the clause, related to Romania, was publicly made for the first time by the leader of the European People’s Party group and of the Democrats from the European Parliament, Joseph Daul, last week. He declared, at Timisoara, that there is a risk that this clause be applied as there is no certainty that European money is directed to the objectives they are requested for.

by Andrada Cristea
Source: Nine o'Clock