Bulgarian MinAgri: 10% of Rural Development Programme's Budget to Go to LEADER Approach
Ten per cent of the Rural Development Programme's budget in the new programming period will be set aside for the LEADER approach for community-led local development, Agriculture, Food and Forestry Minister Desislava Taneva said on Tuesday.
She was speaking at the opening of an international conference on the community-led local development approach in Bulgaria and Europe, the Agriculture Ministry reported.
LEADER is an innovative approach within the EU's policy on rural development that is applied individually in each Member State. Its main idea is to make the strategies for the development of rural areas more efficient by leaving their formulation and application to local participants. The main tool for involving local communities in decision-making is the Local Action Group (LAG).
Taneva told the conference that this is the second programming period when the LEADER approach is being applied in Bulgaria. Now it will be applied on a considerably larger territory, with twice as many LAGs and a greater population coverage.
She specified that the 2007-2013 programming period saw the implementation of over 1,300 projects for investments in small local communities; there were 35 LAGs covering 57 municipalities and some 25 per cent of the country's territory with a population of just under 800,000 people. In the current programming period, there already are 64 LAGs covering 117 municipalities and some 50 per cent of Bulgaria's territory with a population exceeding 1.6 million people, and around 2,500 projects are expected to be implemented. The participants in Tuesday's conference heard a video address by Romanian Agriculture and Rural Development Minister Adrian-Nechita Oros.
Source: BTA Daily news