Brussels, 18/03/2002 (Agence Europe) - At the informal meeting of Ministers of Culture, taking place on Monday and Tuesday, 18 and 19 March in Salamanca (European Culture Capital 2002), and chaired by Pilar del Castillo Vera, Spain's Minister of Education, Commissioner Viviane Reding will be presenting the new European portal "Europe and Culture". The new culture policy portal offers simple and free access to information, previously not brought together in one place, on the EU's many cultural actions and highlights the variety and importance of the EU's interventions in this field. With the collaboration of the Ministers of Culture of the Member States and cultural players, the portal aims to become a European reference of cultural information. Moreover, in her remarks on the future Culture 2000 programme, Mrs Reding noted that there are presently EUR 36 million per annum available for the 28 countries participating in the programme, whereas the city of Frankfurt, for example, spends EUR 215 million a year on culture policy. On top of this, there is a technical problem: the EC financial perspectives adopted in the run-up to 2006. For the Commission, "proposing a new programme in these conditions means implementing a long and burdensome procedure that will consume human resources, and leading at best to a Culture 2000 Plus programme, without any significant budget increase, without major modifications and without any rethinking of the operational modes (deemed unsatisfactory) of our cultural action for the past 10 years".