Agriculture minister Zsolt Simon was not satisfied with the outcome of Tuesday’s cabinet meeting, when the ministers decided on the division of next year’s reserve in the state budget for priorities of government departments totaling SKK 5.1 billion. Mr. Simon keeps on requesting the direct payments to farmers at the level of 55 percent of what farmers in European Union (EU) get, while the reserve, which the Finance ministry approved to the agriculture sector enables to pay farmers only 50 percent of EU support. The definitive version of the state budget for 2004 is supposed to be approved in the cabinet on October 8.

The department of agriculture received SKK 678 million from so far not divided part of the reserve of SKK 741 million. Finance Minister Ivan Miklos announced after the cabinet’s meeting, that the agriculture sector received 90 percent of the available part of the reserve. He added that it is not appropriate to compare the direct payments in Slovakia with the neighboring countries, because it used to be different in the past as well. According to Mr. Miklos Slovak agriculture has the highest year-on-year budget hike from all accession countries, rising from SKK 13 billion to SKK 17 billion. He concluded that the only possible way of further increasing of the payments to farmers was to reduce budgets of other departments, which depended on their mutual agreements.

Mr. Simon said that the budget structure of the sector of agriculture was set according to EU directives and that there is no space for reallocating money for farmers within the sector.

The department of agriculture thus stayed the last problematic area. Other ministers said that they accept the budget draft. Slovenian farmers will get support of 85 percent of EU payments, Hungarian 55 percent, as well as Polish and Czech farmers

The budget for 2004 counts with income of SKK 249.2 billion and expenses of SKK 310.7 billion. The deficit of public finance is planned to reach 3.9 percent of GDP, which accounts for SKK 50.4 billion.