Brussels, 31/01/2001 (Agence Europe) - As we previously announced (see EUROPE of 26 January, p.9), the European Commission adopted, on Wednesday, the preliminary draft of the supplementary and amending budget (SAB) of EUR 971 million that must be used to finance certain emergency measures taken in the framework of the fight against the epidemic of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE): - slaughtering and incineration of bovines (EUR 700 million); - intervention (238 million); - co-financing of screening tests (33 million).
Commenting on this decision, Commissioner Michaele Schreyer underlined that this SAB leads, compared to the 2000 budget, to a very strong increase (7.44%) in agricultural spending and the whole of the Community budget (4.3%), while the Finance Ministers had decided last year that the increase in the general budget should not exceed 3.5%. She indicated that the Ecofin Council would examine this SAB, next 12 February. Mrs Schreyer explained that these EUR 971 million would come from the leftovers of the budget for 2000 and that the Member States will not have to provide additional contributions to the 2001 budget. "The Berlin ceiling was confirmed during the Nice Summit and no revision of the financial perspective is presently under consideration", she recalled while feeling that "the margin of the agricultural budget is exhausted". Mrs Schreyer insisted on this last point. Answering a journalist, she nevertheless admitted that the margin for manoeuvre for agricultural spending was EUR 1.2 billion and that there remains, after the deduction of this SAB, a total of around EUR 260 million. This amount is added to a volume of EUR 245 million coming from the credits aimed at market spending (this amount results from the difference between the true exchange rate of the Euro with the Dollar compared to the reference rate initially used to the calculation of market spending: Ed.), or a total of around EUR 505 million. For Mrs Schreyer, the present appreciation of the Euro makes this margin perfectly "virtual". "If new needs present themselves in the framework of the BSE crisis, the measures will have to be financed with saving made in other areas than the agricultural budget," said the Commissioner while excluding any transfer of credits from other parts of the budget. She underlined that other policies have not benefited from an increase of more than 1% compared to 2000 while the agricultural budget, which consumes on its own close to 50% of the general budget, has risen 7%. The spending dedicated to beef (EUR 7 billion) have on their own increased by more than 50%, she added. Mrs Schreyer says that Commissioner Franz Fischler, responsible for agriculture, should immediately seek solutions to avoid worsening the crisis (she cited measures aiming to: - reduce production; - slow intervention; - pay premium to bovines earlier in order to promote their fattening).