FLASH
Shkruar nga Mero Baze
To define a supportive policy for the village, we must first see what the biggest problem we have with the village today is...
The government has made some seemingly favorable changes to compensation for livestock farmers by lowering the floor for the number of heads for compensation. So now a farmer who keeps 5 cows, and a farmer who keeps a minimum of 50 goats or sheep can benefit from state compensation.
Of course, it is something more positive than what has been twice as bad as this, but I still remain unclear why the Albanian government sees the farmer in the village as a being who must fulfill a certain algorithm to be compensated and does not take him for granted as someone who lives in the village and should be compensated.
To define a supportive policy for the village, we must first see what the biggest problem we have with the village today is. The government, as far as we can understand from the schemes it applies, considers the village populated and towards development and sets ceilings and floors to compensate those who do business with milk and meat.
They undoubtedly need to be compensated and supported, but the problem we have with the village is that it is heading towards complete emptying. Those who have remained in the village in the majority no longer have the power or the opportunity to raise large herds of livestock, except for those who do business. With the continuation of this scheme, those who receive subsidies have a chance to increase their livestock, while the majority who do not receive them will lose them altogether.
How can you explain to a villager that someone who has 5 cows will get 600 euros a year, while someone who has 4 cows will get nothing. So the one who has 5 cows will have 7 cows and the one who has 4 cows will have 3 the next year. This does nothing but polarize business from survival in the village and continues to desperately drive away from the village even those who want to live with four cows or 49 sheep, for example. The others below yes and yes.
So the target of this compensation scheme in the village is for those who want to do business in the village. This is a very good thing if someone wants to go to do business in the village and for them there should be special preferential packages, but we are talking about this subsidy scheme hitting those who want to stay in the village. And they are today the problem of the existence of the Albanian village.
Many European countries, including our southern neighbor Greece, have financial incentive policies for living in the countryside, for the return of pensioners there or other material incentives. Meanwhile, our subsidy scheme, besides being modest and without any influence on the decision-making of a villager to stay in the countryside, is also discriminatory against those who want to survive in the countryside.
By imposing conditions, floors, ceilings on the number of heads, etc., subsidy schemes become competitive schemes and not binding for the villagers. This then immerses the subsidy providers in corruption schemes such as the AZHBR was and continues to be the scheme offered by the Ministry of Agriculture.
When I say mandatory and non-competitive scheme, I mean that it should be written in the law that this farmer is entitled to 120 euros per cow, 100 euros per sheep, as they determine, and that this should be mandatory, not in the hands of someone else. Only in the hands of the law. He proves that he has the sheep, he proves that he delivers the milk to a dairy with a NIPT and the government should compensate him.
The neighboring countries of Kosovo and Macedonia have a compensation criterion of the amount of lek that a farmer needs to feed one head, that is, the food base, which is much higher than ours. It's not that we are poorer than them.
Our government at the end of the year doesn't know what to do with 1 billion euros regularly for fear of SPAK being unable to make procurements and pay pending debt obligations that don't help the economy.
In the conditions where Albania has become a regional leader in tourism and should have had the most developed agriculture sector to turn the effect of tourism into a strong financial effect for the national economy, it is now turning tourism into a supplement to the economy of neighboring countries, as they are now our suppliers of food products for our tourism. Greece, Macedonia and Kosovo now earn more from Albanian tourism than we do, as tourism is forced to be supplied by neighboring countries with livestock products such as milk and meat, not to mention vegetables in certain parts of the season.
Don't expect any protests from the villagers about what I'm saying. They don't protest anymore. They just sell the last cow they have and either flee to the city or emigrate. It's better not to export villagers and import milk and meat, but to do the opposite.
Lini një Përgjigje