Farmers (BETAPHOTO/DRAGAN GOJIC)
To this day, five months after the contest for subsidies in April, farmers in Serbia have no information about whether they had been granted the funds, or whether they would get them at all, the president of the Committee for Agriculture of the People’s Movement of Serbia, Katarina Jelisavcic, stated on Sept. 10.
She recollected that the state had earmarked “on paper” RSD100 billion for agriculture, of which, according to announcements of the Ministry of Agriculture, 62 billion in direct subsidies to agricultural producers.
“The People’s Movement of Serbia demands an urgent answer from the authorities about the fate of the subsidies to farmers that have been promised, and whether the agrarian budget is just a piece of paper, while the farmers go bankrupt because of fields scorched by the drought,” Jelisavcic stated, as quoted by the party.
Instead of getting straight information, farmers suffer daily the arrogance of clerks, doors being closed to them and being thrown out of a clerk’s office whenever they attempt to gain insight in the status of their applications. She went on to say that information arrived in the meantime from various parts of Serbia about members and sympathizers of the Serbian Progressive Party and the Socialist Party of Serbia having already received the approval of funds and the dates of payment; if this information turns out to be true, Jelisavcic said, it would be one more proof of state resources being misused by party interests.
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