Bulgaria Rushes EU Agricultural Reforms

By Tatyana Dimitrova

SOFIA, Bulgaria, March 20, 2006 (ENS) - In a last minute rush to meet commitments to the European Union in the run-up to its deadline for membership, Bulgaria is passing new agriculture laws at high speed.

With nine months to go before Sofia hopes to join the Brussels club, many areas of economic and social life still fall short of EU benchmarks.

Now parliament and the government are hurrying to fill the legislative gaps, in order to ensure Bulgaria’s membership is not put on ice.

The Minister for EU Affairs Meglena Kuneva recently said that Brussels might postpone membership for a year, but only if Bulgaria appeared “demonstratively unprepared” for the club.

Bulgarian Minister for EU Affairs Meglena Kuneva (Photo courtesy Government of Luxemborg)

Agriculture is the main area crying out for attention, with European Commission monitoring reports regularly mentioning it as problematic.

Their remarks varied from discontent over delays in setting up an agency to distribute EU farm subsidies to worries about the pace in closing food processing companies that do not meet EU standards.

Recently, agriculture ministry officials have been constant visitors to parliament, working with deputies to adopt the required legislation.

Field of cattle in Bulgaria (Photo credit unknown)

With such a pressing timetable, experts believe the implementation of so many new laws is going to be tricky – to put it mildly.

One special area of concern is the new veterinary medicine act. Although this has now been adopted after various delays, key sub-acts are still not ready.

Following EU standards, the new legislation bans vaccination of cattle hit by epidemics, and from the beginning of 2006 obliges farmers to slaughter infected livestock in the expectation of compensation.

But while Bulgaria has met EU requests to secure 17 million leva, around €8.7 million, to cover compensation in such cases, local institutions have been unable to disburse the money, given the lack of regulations on how to do so.

The criteria concerning the payment of compensation from the fund were never established, says Galya Buchvarova, chair of the country’s Pig Breeders’ Association.

Buchvarova notes that the law contained no instructions about how to proceed in cases when payment of compensation was sought.

As a consequence, with two epidemics now raging among pig stocks, farmers fear they may end up slaughtering their livestock without receiving compensation.

On March 10, Bulgarian veterinary health authorities reported a second outbreak of swine fever in the southeast of the country and slaughtered some 56 pigs to prevent the spread of the disease. (Photo courtesy Aitos 8500)

Another problem with the veterinary act is that while it details the closure of sub-standard food-processing companies, it contains no legal teeth to penalize violators.

In practice, the owners often reopen their companies despite the official bans imposed on them.

The Agriculture Ministry has admitted it is unable to tackle this problem and has sought the aid of the Interior Ministry.

Meanwhile, parliament has now approved an amendment to the Farmers Support Act, regulating the establishment of a Payments Agency to distribute EU agriculture subsidies.

Even this is the not the end of the problem, however, as the amendment envisages the state adding supplements to the EU fund, which the finance ministry says it cannot fulfil.

Deputy Finance Minister Lyubomir Datsov said the pledge conflicts with Sofia’s existing commitments to the International Monetary Fund to rein in levels of government spending.

However, in the hope of attracting a favorable EU monitoring report next time, the ruling coalition has persuaded the opposition to limit its criticism of the current muddle, so as not to feed a mood of Euro-scepticism.

“I find it positive that the necessary legislation is being adopted so successfully,” Ventsislav Vurbanov, member of the parliamentary Agriculture Committee and a former minister of agriculture, said in typically upbeat fashion.

“We are doing everything we can to prepare the state on time,” he said.

But the relentless official optimism has not entirely wiped away people’s doubts about how the farming community is going to adjust to laws passed with such haste, and without the additional framework that some of them need.

{Published in cooperation with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR). Tatyana Dimitrova is journalist with Darik Radio in Sofia and a contributor to Balkan Insight.}