Although the Agriculture and Rural Development Strategy of the Republic of Serbia for the period 2014-2024. adopted at the end of August, apart from the information that Serbia has a new strategy, there were no major reviews or comments in the media. The strategy was presented to the public at the end of October, at the "Food for Europe" forum, with the bombastic announcement by the organizers that the potential of agricultural production is as much as 30 billion euros per year.
"We have to be realistic," Dragan Šagovnović, director of the Economic Institute, told Vreme. "Thirty billion euros of the gross value of domestic agricultural production would be possible if our gross value per hectare was at the level of the most developed EU countries, such as the Netherlands." It is unrealistic that we, with such a technological lag, within the duration of the Strategy, could achieve as much as the most developed ones, and that is why I said at the 'Food for Europe' forum that it would be good to reach at least the average of the EU countries - that would be 12-13 billion euros from agriculture annually, which can be a medium-term goal. In order to reach that goal, it is necessary to overcome the technological backwardness of our agriculture, because there has been no investment in it for years. We cannot separate rural development, and in Serbia the villages are dead, from the development of agriculture - someone has to be there, and be the bearer of development. Also, I think that it is very important for our agriculture to be very careful in the eventual privatization. The corporatization of agricultural goods should have that absolute advantage. You cannot go for the classic sale of either agricultural land or agricultural enterprises. We need to corporatize the state-owned enterprises that we still have today, that is, introduce corporate governance that would separate the function of management from the function of ownership. In those companies, the state should become a good owner, instead of a bad manager. I certainly do not agree with the thesis that privatization is the only way to improve corporate governance - there is that popular proverb, "Nobody burns down a house to drive mice out of the attic." And now, because we claim that we cannot corporatize and improve management in public companies, that's why we will privatize everything. It is, in my opinion, a neoliberal concept that, even in the world, after the economic crisis, has proven to be completely wrong and unfounded, that is, it cannot work. On the other hand, when it comes to privatization itself, and I mean agricultural land and combines, we should think about strategic partnership models, but above all about various public-private partnership (PPP) models, because the participation of a private partner in that provided companies with the necessary funds for investment, but also accelerated the process of improving corporate governance," says Šagovnović.
VISION AND STRATEGIC GOALS: According to the Strategy, Serbian agriculture in 2024 should "be a sector whose development is based on knowledge, modern technologies and standards, which offers innovative products to domestic and demanding foreign markets, and provides producers with a sustainable and stable income", as well as to " natural resources, the environment and the cultural heritage of rural areas are managed in accordance with the principles of sustainable development, in order to make rural areas an attractive place for young people and other inhabitants of rural areas to live and work. areas". This vision of the state of Serbian agriculture in ten years needs to be reached by fulfilling strategic goals, and each of them is explained in detail in the Strategy. The strategic goals are the growth of production and the stability of the producer's income, the growth of competitiveness while adapting to the requirements of the domestic and foreign markets and the technical and technological improvement of the agricultural sector, sustainable management of resources and environmental protection, improvement of the quality of life in rural areas and reduction of poverty, and effective management of public policies. and improving the institutional framework for the development of agriculture and rural areas.
However, the Strategy will (again) remain a dead letter, if the National Agricultural Development Program and the National Rural Development Program are not adopted, which are adopted for a shorter period (seven years), and which should enable the implementation of the Strategy. In the words of Dr. Natalija Bogdanov, a full professor at the Faculty of Agriculture in Belgrade, otherwise the leader of the expert group that created the Strategy, she says that the Ministry of Agriculture is on the move, because it needs to create the mentioned programs, and notes that the programs for the previous strategy, adopted in 2005, made only in 2010.
"You wandered for years, two ministers changed every year, which only showed that you don't have a compass, that you don't know where you're going and what you're doing." However, a much bigger and more important problem for Serbia than to express the future development in numbers, tons, liters, heads, is how to be competitive in the market of your own country tomorrow, when the market is liberalized. Our problem is much bigger, whether we will raise those standards and be able to guarantee food quality, and whether we will do what with our resources. Our country is in the weeds, a parlog, and that is a much bigger, generational, essential, political problem. And in the Strategy itself, there is a very strong focus on resources and their sustainability, we are not really aware of it: that we no longer have cows or sheep, that the problem is water, landslides, soil quality... I understand that for macroeconomists and for the stability of the budget, it is something the second is more important, but agriculture has been carrying the heavy burden of our various circuses for 25 years, since the nineties. There is no sector that can reproduce itself as much as agriculture can, but if it can do it for 25 years - it can't. It is far from the fact that it doesn't matter how much you will export, just work, but the phase of productivism as an imperative was abandoned in Europe in the nineties, and our reality is such that productivism is a topic for countries like us. However, we must not exaggerate it, the principles of the Strategy include sustainability and polycentric development. The entire east of Serbia, including the Banat, and all the way to the south, the entire eastern side of the country is half empty for you, that is also the topic of the Strategy. There were stories that care for small farms is social welfare. It is by no means social. Agriculture also has a social function in the context of sustainability. Farms do not disappear overnight, it is a process that lasts for centuries. We should not be guided by the attitude from the old strategy, to 'support commercially'. It's commercial, we support every hectare of land, it's an agricultural strategy," says Prof. Dr. Natalija Bogdanov for "Vreme". She adds that the state will not have money to increase support for agriculture until 2017, but that by that time the entire sector should be prepared for pre-accession funds. Due to previous failures, they will not bring much funds, says prof. Bogdanov, but if the steps foreseen in the strategy were followed, the funds could be used to the maximum at the moment of accession to the EU. "If you don't do that, you won't get the most out of the pre-accession period or accession. In short, that's the essence," Natalija Bogdanov concludes.
CHALLENGES OF LIBERALIZATION: Nikola Vujacic, Director of Operations in Victoria Group, reminds that this year ends the last one, the sixth year of liberalization of the agricultural market, and that the average customs protection in agriculture fell from 20 to below three percent. "The question arises whether domestic agriculture should be given a little more time to prepare for open market competition in Europe" says Vujacic for "Time". "Absolutely respecting the fact that the strategy by definition must be a long-term document and conditionally of a more general character, I think that this document had to offer answers to some specific questions to everyone involved in agribusiness, and one of the questions that I believe should have been answered is the expiry of the liberalization towards the European Union agricultural market food products produced in Serbia. What pleases us at Victoria Group is that the strategy is based on the vision of agriculture that we are already realizing in practice knowledge-based agriculture, modern technologies and European standards. Our processing capacities in the Sojaprotein and Victoriaoil factories are based on this, and we continuously invest in their modernization, improving production and reaching the highest international standards in the food industry. In the last ten years, we have invested more than 200 million euros in companies operating within our company. We certainly understand the limitations of the domestic budget, and that is why we believe that in the future it is very important to have EU pre-accession funds available for the oilseeds and cereals sector. The fact is that in these sectors Serbia can do much more than is currently the case, which, after all, is explicitly stated in the Strategy. Access to these funds would contribute to better utilization of available processing capacities, but also to the country's greater foreign exchange inflow, as well as the higher income of farmers. Victoria Group exports about half of its production, primarily products of added value from domestic raw materials. This year, we realized a record purchase of sunflowers and soybeans for the maximum utilization of the capacities of our factories. From that perspective, we see that it is necessary to find optimal solutions for the much-needed improvement of the competitiveness of Serbian agriculture in all its aspects segments. "
