Materials on EU funds Programming

With less than three months to go until the 2014-2020 EU budgetary period gets underway, a Bulgarian Partnership Agreement is being discussed with the European Commission – but the less said about it the better. In the spirit, though, of a country where a shake of the head means ‘Yes’, we have chosen to spill the beans at some length on where familiar mistakes are being taken, and where they may lead.

There is a big long list of technical jargon attached to the programming documents of the EU funds for the 2014-2020 funding period – enough to fill an entire blog post on its own. But you will be relieved to read that, in the context of Latvia’s ongoing negotiations as to how we will spend our future EU budget money, I will focus on only one of these items. It may be a bit of a mouthful, but it is what it says it is – only in Latvia, as environmental NGOs are discovering, what should be a safeguard for the environment appears to have gone missing.

So far the planning for Latvia’s use of the EU funds for the 2014-2020 period has been a reasonably positive experience from a partnership perspective. Yet the process that has, until recently, been notable for its transparency and high level of public participation is now in danger of being derailed.

While the EU's future common agricultural policy is taking shape in Brussels, it’s not just there that major agri-business interests are flexing their muscles to take the ‘green-ness’ out of EU agricultural spending.