Croatian farming gears up for EU entry

Croatia has lost half its farmland in 20 years of independence and is heavily reliant on food imports, but next year's European Union entry will jolt the farm sector out of years of complacency, the farming minister said on Wednesday. "In 2011, our agricultural trade deficit was $750 million. It is high time we started rethinking agriculture as a strategic sector. We must reverse years of negative trends and increase the output," Tihomir Jakovina told Reuters in an interview.
Croatia is due to join the EU in July 2013 and the new centre-left cabinet, which took office in late December, plans to put an end to sale of state-owned land to Croats and foreigners alike. "This government sees water, forest and farmland as national resources which are not for sale. What we will have are concessions and long-term lease," Jakovina said, adding that the law regulating that should be in parliament before summer.
The boomerang-shaped country with a scenic, tourism-oriented Adriatic coast, currently produces only wheat, corn, eggs, chicken, tangerines and strawberries in sufficient quantities. "All the rest, we have to import," Jakovina said. Croatia's total farmland has shrunk to 1.6 million hectares from 3.2 million hectares registered in 1989, two years before its independence from communist Yugoslavia.
Some land was lost to the budding construction sector while some fell into disuse after socialist-era food conglomerates, which regularly bought products from local farmers, collapsed in privatisation and the 1991-95 independence war. After it becomes the EU's 28th member, Croatia will get 373 million euros ($498 million) per year from the bloc's Common Agricultural Policy, slightly more than the current subsidies from the Croatian government.
It will also get 330 million euros for rural development, but that will depend on projects Brussels must approve. "We are looking at 15 months of painstaking, hard work to adjust our institutions, prepare the producers," Jakovina said. Jakovina said concerns voiced by conservative farmers over traditional practices were largely unfounded and examples from new EU members, particularly Poland, showed that farmers had only profited from membership and access to funds and a market of 500 million people. "We cannot be a country with hyperproduction of food, but what we produce must be of high quality, with good marketing and some of that can be sold through tourism, through our hotels.