Comparative Evaluation of the Special pre-Accession Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development (SAPARD) 2004-05.

SAPARD was introduced to help candidate countries reform their agricultural sectors and promote rural development.  It also had the aim of creating the institutional arrangements that would enable the new member states to comply with the agricultural chapters of the acquis communautaire. With an annual budget of 520 million and under the responsibility of DG Agriculture, the SAPARD program started on January 1, 2000, and is budgeted to last until the end of 2006. Projects cover a variety of measures from investments in agricultural holdings, developing rural infrastructure, supporting modernisation of the food processing sector and generally attempting to diversify the rural economy.  The exact allocation to each country was based on criteria such as the size of agricultural area, the farming population and GDP per capita. Poland received the largest allocation of 160 million euro per year and Slovenia the smallest at 6.3 million euro.

This research project was co-ordinated by the European Institute in Bulgaria and funded by the Local Government Initiative of the Open Society Institute.  It involved seven country case studies looked at the implementing arrangements, the monitoring systems and the impact of select projects.  Katalin Kovacs, Krisztina Magocs and Zsuzsanna Bihari from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Center for Regional Studies wrote the chapter on Hungary. The full text can be downloaded here.

Hard copies of the report are available and can be obtained from the lead co-ordinator Magardich Hulian, mhulian@europeaninstitute.net.