Hungary to spend over EUR 14.7 bn on sector in CAP funding over 5 years

Under Hungary’s strategic plan for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), approved recently by the European Commission, a budget of 14.7 billion euros will be allocated to Hungarian agriculture over a period of five years, the agriculture minister said on Facebook on Thursday.

Brussels will provide funding worth 8.4 billion euros, and the other half of the budget will come from state coffers, István Nagy said in a Facebook post.

The first pillar of the funding, to the tune of 6.8 billion euros, will be fully funded by the EU, he said. The second pillar will comprise 6.3 billion euros in state and 1.6 billion euros in EU funding, the minister added.

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Hungary’s “extraordinarily large contribution” will amount to the largest ever support for Hungarian rural development projects, farmers and food processing companies, Nagy said. Over the next five years, 52 percent of rural development funding, some 1,500 billion forints (EUR 3.7bn) will go towards economic development and agricultural and food industry investment, he said. That is four times the amount the sector received in the last financing cycle, he added.

“The effective use of those funds will contribute to achieving the aim… to increase gross value-added of agricultural production by 53 percent, to 862 euro per hectare,” he said.

Agricultural exports are expected to grow by 57 percent to 15 billion euros. Food industry investments could shoot up by 117 percent, to 1.8 billion euros.

Meanwhile, one-third of rural development funds will go towards sustainable and green goals, raising the sector’s funding by 150 percent, he said. As a result, forest areas could grow by 148,000 hectares, accounting for 27 percent of the country’s territory, the minister said.

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Source: MTI