Small cereal producers affected by the 2022 crises will receive one-off assistance.
At a meeting on August 14, the government approved the Regulation on the establishment of the procedure for providing assistance to farmers affected by the consequences of the crises in 2022, which will take effect upon its publication in Monitorul Oficial (the Official Journal of Moldova). According to the document, micro and small farmers who cultivate first group crops - wheat, barley, oats, triticale - on an area of 0.5 to 1,500 hectares will receive one-off assistance. The amount of assistance will be determined depending on the total number of applications submitted by agricultural producers, with the application of a beneficiary categorization coefficient, depending on the area of cultivated farmland. The maximum amount of assistance per beneficiary will be 400 thousand lei. The list of beneficiaries and the amount of aid will be established by the Agency for Intervention and Payments in Agriculture, based on the applications of small farmers. The regulation contains a list of documents to be submitted by the applicant and mandatory conditions for receiving the aid, formulas for calculating the aid and the procedure of its transfer to the beneficiaries. The explanatory note to the document says that small farmers suffered the most from the crises of 2022. Thus, due to the war in Ukraine there was registered a shortage and increased prices of nitrogen-containing fertilizers, as well as increased logistics costs and energy resources costs. The drought of spring-summer 2022 reduced yields of all agricultural crops - in total, according to general estimates, about 324 thousand hectares of the above-mentioned cereals of the first group were affected. At the same time, against the background of general inflation growth, the cost of agricultural products sales decreased. The initial anti-crisis aid for farmers will amount to about 200 million lei, which will allow supporting about 3,000 small farmers. At the same time, the lump-sum aid will complement other support measures for small farmers, aimed at preventing the bankruptcy of farmers, increasing the sustainability of agricultural production and ensuring Moldova's food security. // 14.08.2023 - InfoMarket.
