Small-scale farmers struggle for EU funds.

21.05.2008 - 11:10 CET | By Leigh Phillips for the EUobserver.

From BRUSSELS - While large EU states are scrapping over how to get more environmental bang for the EU’s agricultural buck, in the southeast corner of the EU, small-scale farming – which contributes the most to biodiversity – is not getting the support it needs.

This is the initial conclusion of a series of studies jointly realised by the WWF and the Dutch government which were presented to European Commission on Thursday (15 May).

The EU has made some €2.6 billion available for supporting rural development and the environment in Bulgaria and Romania up to 2013, but not much of this finds its way to subsistence farmers, according to the investigation.

There are currently 4 million subsistence farmers in Romania with less than 2 hectares of land that are not eligible for any kind of support.

In Bulgaria, there are 139,00 semi-subsistence farmers, of which only 30 percent are eligible for area-based payments.

“[These farmers] make a significant contribution to securing environmental benefits and services, from biodiversity to drinking water and flood management,” said Yanka Kazakova of the WWF Danube-Carpathian Programme.

In the Danube-Carpathian region, many local species and their characteristic habitats depend upon continued good management of small farms to sustain diversity.

This sort of farming depends on low-input farming practices and tend to be a more environmentally friendly form of agriculture than its industrialised cousin.

The highest concentration of well-maintained high nature value areas is in the countries of Central and South Eastern Europe, largely due to the traditional farming practices that remain in use. In Bulgaria, roughly one-third of the farmland is considered of high nature value.

EU agricultural support is supposed to help precisely this sort of farming, but instead is mostly directed at large landowners and agribusiness.

The WWF studies found that the basic problem is the focus on the economic viability of farms – effectively disqualifying the subsistence and semi-subsistence farms.

The investigation also found that although EU funding programmes include measures for supporting high nature value farmland, many farmers cannot apply for these or indeed any support as their land is not officially considered as agricultural land, although it may be rich in biodiversity.

Another problem plaguing many areas of the region is unclear land tenure. As a result, farmers can often apply only for funds for considerably less land than they actually use.

“The fact that high nature value farmland payments exist at all in these rural development programmes is noteworthy,” Ms Kazakova said. “Now they just need to be targeted more effectively.”

“It is essential that EU as well as national policy makers take into account not only economic but also environmental and social benefits of EU funding programmes,” she added.

{But what is economic benefit in a world that will become less petroleum based? What about the benefits of subsistem farming and local/decentralized markets - the so called farmers markets that survived even the Soviet collectivization drive? Is now the EU going to “Americanize those remaining vestiges of real private enterprise - the family agricultural plot? www.SustainabiliTank.info comment}

Poland and Sweden to pitch ‘Eastern Partnership’ idea

By Philippa Runner, May 22, 2008.

Poland and Sweden are to unveil joint proposals for a new eastern Europe policy at an EU foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels on Monday (26 May), in a mini-version of France’s “Mediterranean Union.” The “Eastern Partnership” envisages a multinational forum between the EU-27 and neighbouring states Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Polish press agency PAP reports. {This list amounts to the old GUAM States + Armenia}

The forum would aim to negotiate visa-free travel deals, free trade zones for services and agricultural products and strategic partnership agreements with the five countries.

It would also launch smaller, bilateral projects on student exchange, environmental protection and energy supply, but would avoid the controversial topic of EU membership perspectives.

Dictatorship Belarus could join at a technical and expert-level only. Russia would also be invited to cooperate on local initiatives, involving the Kaliningrad enclave for example.

Unlike the grander Mediterranean club, the eastern set-up would not have its own secretariat but would be run by the European Commission and financed from the 2007 to 2013 European neighbourhood policy budget. A commission official would be appointed as its “special coordinator.”
Following the foreign ministers’ debate, Warsaw hopes to secure formal approval at the EU summit in June and to start detailed work on the “partnership” by the end of the year.

Warm reception:

Germany, the UK and the Netherlands have also voiced initial support, but Spain and Italy could prove problematic while Ukraine will have to be persuaded the partnership offers something better than the current EU neighbourhood package, Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza reports.

“The EU’s eastern policy is of interest to the whole EU,” Polish commissioner Danuta Hubner told the Rzeczpospolita newspaper. “The weakness of [previous] northern, eastern or southern European Union policies was that they existed only in the sphere of interest of member countries in those regions.”

Half of EU citizens on the net, but rural Europe left behind. Out of the half a billion EU citizens, more than 250 million regularly use the internet, according to newly released figures.

A European Commission report on the results so far for i2010, the EU’s digital-led strategy for growth and jobs, further showed that of this number, 80 percent have access to some form of broadband connection.

April 18, 2008, By Leigh Phillips for EUobserver:

Additionally, says the report - released on Friday (18 April) some 60 percent of public services in the EU are fully available online, with two thirds of schools and half of doctors making use of high-speed internet connections.

“However, some parts of the EU are still lagging behind and are not fully connected,” she warned.

The report notes that nearly 40 percent of Europeans do not use the internet at all. While in Denmark only 13 percent of the population do not use the internet, Romania is at the other end of the scale with 69 percent of its population offline.

The report notes that the EU-wide average for DSL broadband penetration is nearly 90 percent (DSL networks are used by 80 percent of EU broadband subscribers, and so are used as a proxy by the report’s analysts for broadband more generally, although cable and wireless broadband services do also exist).

However, the report also says that figures for national broadband coverage also “hide a gap between rural and urban areas in several countries,” noting that full coverage remains a challenge in a number of countries.

Greece, Slovakia, Latvia, Italy, Poland, Lithuania and Germany show “a large gap”, between coverage in urban and rural areas.

Germany has a broadband coverage rate of 94 percent overall, but only 58 percent of rural areas have access to high-speed internet.

Greece, with its island geography comes in last on both scores, with under 20 percent of the country being serviced with broadband, and only ten percent having access in rural areas.

Wherever this rural-urban split happens, it is due to difficulties and increased costs involved with the provision of new technologies to areas with challenging topographies and population densities that make offering these services unattractive to companies that sell internet access.

UNI Telecom, the international union federation representing telecoms workers, argues that this is where the market liberalisation in the telecommunications sector is shown to fail, as private firms cherry-pick urban, population-dense and wealthy areas to build service infrastructure.

In the past, they argue, public service provision would have used the ‘postage stamp’ model where profitable urban areas subsidise the more expensive provision of service to rural areas.

The current situation however leaves rural, remote and poor areas with substandard service or even none at all, says the union. Urban zones with high concentrations of elderly citizens, who can have less of an interest in the internet, are also sometimes underserved.

A commission spokesperson conceded that this is the case, but countered that this is why EU rules on state aid permit public financing or partnerships to deliver broadband or other new technologies to such areas, ensuring universal service provision.

A NAGORNO-KARABAKH FOREIGN MINISTRY IN DISCUSSIONS WITH THE EU?

The Nabucco pipeline - the EU hopes construction will begin in 2010
(Photo: Nagorno-Karabakh foreign ministry)

Turkmenistan to cut EU dependence on Russian gas.

April 14, 2008 - By Renata Goldirova, for the EUobserver.

Turkmenistan has agreed to supply 10 billion cubic metres of natural gas to the European Union each year - something that should cut the energy-hungry bloc’s dependence on gas from Russia.

“The president [Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov] gave us assurances that 10 bcm will be set aside for Europe in addition to possibilities in new fields to be tendered,” EU external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner told the Financial Times on Sunday (13 April).

Ms Ferrero-Waldner described the deal as “a very important first step” in energy cooperation, although she acknowledged the amount agreed by the two sides does not represent a “vast quantity”.

The former Soviet Republic in Central Asia has the world’s fifth largest reserves of natural gas and substantial deposits of oil. It annually produces 60 billion cubic metres of natural gas, but two-thirds are exported to Russia’s state-run Gazprom.

Demand for energy is sharply rising in the European Union. By 2020, it is expected to import at least 360 bcm - out of 500 bcm consumed - from third countries.

The 27-nation bloc has been trying to diversify its energy supplies away from Russia and is currently pushing for a new energy corridor, the Nabucco pipeline.

The pipeline - connecting Turkey with Austria, via Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary - would enable the transportation of Caspian energy resources to the European market. Main gas supplies could come from countries such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan or Egypt.

Speaking about the fresh deal with Turkmenistan, Ms Ferrero-Waldner called on European business to invest in infrastructure in order to bring the project to life.

It is still unclear how Turkmen gas will be imported to Europe, with the commissioner suggesting three possible short-term scenarios in the interview with the Financial Times.

Under the first one, a 60-kilometre gap between Azeri and Turkmen offshore installations could be closed with a mini-pipeline.

Secondly, an onshore link to Kazakhstan could be built to connect with a route to Azerbaijan.

Under the third option, the gas could be compressed into liquid form and taken by tanker across the sea.

————————-

Russia questions value of Nabucco energy pipeline.

April 18, 2008 - By Renata Goldirova from Brussels for EUobserver:

Moscow has questioned the viability of the EU-backed Nabucco energy corridor, a pipeline designed to lessen the bloc’s dependency on Russia.

“I know few things about political geography. The only way to fill the Nabucco pipeline is to rely on Iranian gas,” Russian ambassador to the EU Vladimir Chizhov told journalists earlier this week (15 April). He added: “But then, it’s up to the West, I would not tell the EU, to make up its mind how to deal with Iran. Either bomb Iran or buy its gas.”

Mr Chizhov’s blunt comments came only hours after Turkmenistan had agreed to supply 10 billion cubic metres of natural gas to the EU each year - something that should cut the energy-hungry bloc’s dependence on gas from Russia.

The European Commission considers Nabucco to be “essential” to the EU as it is designed to bring gas from non-traditional suppliers via a new transport route.

The pipeline - connecting Turkey with Austria, via Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary - would enable the transportation of gas from the resource-rich Caspian region to the European market.

Its capacity amounts to 31 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year. The bulk of the supplies are expected to come from countries such as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan or Egypt.

The EU is also hoping to secure natural gas from Iraq, with Baghdad earlier this week pledging to provide five billion cubic metres of gas each year. The two sides are set to sign a so-called energy security memorandum of understanding in coming days.

In response to Mr Chizhov’s statements, the commission said that a list of source countries was yet to be defined. It addmitted, however, that once the problems with Iran are solved, Tehran can be taken into consideration on the longer term.

Meanwhile, Moscow - the world’s largest producer of natural gas - has been pushing for its own project, the South Stream pipeline. It should connect Russia’s Black Sea coast and Italy, with Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary and Serbia already saying they will take part in the project.

According to the Russian ambassador to Brussels, there will be enough room for the South Stream, Nabucco and perhaps for another pipeline due to growing energy consumption in Europe - but only in the long run.

In the short run, the defining difference is that the South Stream can rely on real gas supply, whereas Nabucco does not have gas, Mr Chizov said.

The South Stream project is seen by some as a rival to Nabucco, with the European Commission saying “it is not promoting it actively” because the pipeline will bring more gas from Russia.

“The two projects are complementary, not contradictory,” reads the commission’s official line on the issue. The EU needs 80 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year on top of current consumption.

But some experts on EU-Russia energy relations have also suggested that Moscow has made a valid point.

According to Marco Giuli from the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies, the Nabucco pipeline is “economically viable only with Iranian gas”.

He cited political tensions in Central Asia, the proximity of Chinese market as well as the US’ tough stance on Iran among those factors that cloud Nabucco’s prospects.

Within the 27-nation EU, France and the UK seem to have the toughest position towards the Iranian regime, wanting to stop its nuclear ambitions not only through dialogue, but also via sanctions.

On the other hand, Italy’s oil and gas producer ENI is set to undertake some investments in Iran - something, Mr Guili says has been endorsed by the country’s outgoing as well as incoming political leadership.

Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe.    www.alde.eu
ALDE public hearing “Republic of Moldova and its European future.”

This event is organised by ALDE MEPs: Cristian Busoi, Magor Imre Csibi,
Jelko Kacin and Istvan Szent-Iványi

06/05/2008, 15:30 - 18:30, ASP 5G1, European Parliament, Brussels

To register please contact  willem.vandenbroucke at europarl.europa…. and
visit our website http://www.alde.eu/index.php?id=96

—————

ALDE Seminar “Arctic Governance in a global world: is it time for an Arctic Charter?”
07/05/2008

Event date: 07/05/08 16:30 to 19:00
Organizer:
Location: Room A3G3, European Parliament, Brussels
For more information
Krings Thomas - Tel: +32 2 284 32 42

10.30 – 10.40
Opening and welcome address
Corrado Clini, GBEP Chair

10.40 – 11.00
Biofuels: a solution for climate change
Luca Belelli Marchesini, University of Tuscia, Department of Forest Science and Resources

11.00 – 11.20
Case study of bioenergy project
Gian Piero Latini, Agrotec spa

11.20 – 11.40
Opportunities to promote biofuels production in Central and Eastern Europe – EUBIA experience and perspective
Angela Grassi, EUBIA European Biomass Industry Association

11.40 – 12.00
Strategy to meet EU target on biofuel production and consumption – Italian scenario and perspective
Giuseppe Caserta, ITABIA Italian Biomass Industry Association

12.00 – 12.20
The European Commission proposal for a new Directive on the promotion of biofuels – opportunities and challenges for the private sector
Raffaello Garofalo, EBB European Biodisel Board

12.20 – 12.30
Conclusion

 http://www.sepromania.it

From: Polish Cultural Institute [mailto:mail@polishculture-nyc.org]
Sent: Montag, 31. März 2008 18:25
To:  mail at polishculture-nyc.org
Subject: No. 312: “BORDERLANDERS: FINDING THEIR VOICE” FESTIVAL

The Polish Cultural Institute
presents

The Borderland Foundation in Sejny, Poland,
and the work of its Borderland Center of Arts, Cultures, and Nations
- practising dialogue where the paths of cultures and people cross -

Festival Program:
l
SEJNY CHRONICLES
American Premiere at La MaMa E.T.C.
April 10-20, 2008
10
CAFÉ EUROPA
An Evening of Arts and Letters on the Theme of “Borderlanders”
The Bowery Poetry Club
April 14, 2008
10
FILMS ABOUT THE BORDERLANDS
Millennium Film Workshop, Inc.
April 9-17, 2008
101
BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE FUTURE: MEMORY WORK IN THE BORDERLANDS
A Conversation with Krzysztof Czyzewski, president of the Borderland Foundation
The New School for Social Research
April 16, 2008

The Borderland Foundation’s work involves an artistic rediscovering of the area’s rich multicultural heritage, which had been all but destroyed by two world wars.                                             – Ian Fisher, The New York Times

In just over a decade Mr. Czyzewski has won an international reputation, helping to set up about a dozen similar centres as far afield as Mostar in Bosnia, Uzhgorod in Ukraine and Arad in Romania.
– Stefan Wagstyl, The Financial Times

Before multitudes from the Eastern European borderlands emigrated to the Lower East Side around 1900, and before many others perished or were resettled in the hell of WWII, the little town of Sejny in northeast Poland was home to Lithuanians, Poles, Jews, Russian Old-believers, Belarusians, Roma, and Germans. As immigrants, they brought their borderland identity with them to the multicultural experiment of America.

For a long time people had been emigrating from Sejny. Today, this little town is exporting to diversified societies worldwide its pioneering methods of community work as a laboratory for multiculturalism. The aim of Borderlanders: Finding Their Voice is to present the ideas and practices of the Sejny-based Borderland Foundation in building bridges between cultures and ethnicities. Multiple identity, exile, immigration, and the arts’ creative role in multicultural community work are the themes that relate the festival’s events to each other.

All performance events are presented in the Lower East Side as a tribute to the multicultural heritage of a district that was home to many Eastern European immigrants in the early 20th century.

BORDERLANDERS: FINDING THEIR VOICE is presented by the Polish Cultural Institute in New York in association with La MaMa E.T.C., Bowery Poetry Club, Millennium Film Workshop, Inc., and the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, New Schoolfor Social Research.

Special thanks to Professor Elzbieta Matynia of the New School for Social Research for her dedication and creative input.

Special thanks to LOT Polish Airlines CARGO

This posting brings up the EUobserver posting on the Ukraine and Georgia application to NATO (two of the GUAM’s - the other two are Azerbaijan and Moldova) and the posting on China with the Tibet Speaker of the Parliament-in-Exile visiting the European Parliament. that we posted also today. The two posting bring up a dilemma felt in Brussels and Washington relating to what should be the position of the West when it comes to issues of Freedom in their dealings with China and Russia. It seems that US Congress leader Nancy Pelosi lines up with the popular demand for principles shown now by the people of the EU. How should elected governments react?

Diplomatic tussle over Georgia and Ukraine NATO bids.

27.03.2008  By Honor Mahony - Germany and other western European states are attempting to block Georgia and Ukraine from getting the green light to join NATO out of a fear of antagonising Russia.

Citing diplomatic sources, German daily Financial Times Deutschland says that a group of western countries do not want Tbilisi and Kiev to get candidate status for membership of the military alliance, something they are due to receive at a high-level summit in Bucharest next week.

At the 2-4 April meeting, Georgia and Ukraine are hoping to get approval for their membership action plans (MAP). This would be considered as a signal that their application bid is on the right track.

The camp of blocking states is said to include Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Luxembourg.

A fear of annoying Russia which is categorically against its two neighbours joining a military organisation to which it does not belong is behind the move.

Earlier in the week, incoming Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said in a Financial Times interview that Moscow was “not happy” with the situation. “We consider that it is extremely troublesome for the existing structure of European security,” he said.

ppeThe move by Germany and France and others puts them in the path of US president George W. Bush, who is in favour of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO. Eastern EU member states such as Poland are also lobbying in favour of Tbilisi’s and Kiev’s membership.

Berlin opposition stems from a desire to keep talks on a compromise between Russia and the US on Washington’s planned missile defence shield - to be placed in Poland and the Czech Republic and strongly opposed by Moscow - on track.

Meanwhile, Georgia has called on NATO not to bow to pressure from Russia.

Foreign minister David Bakradze said it would inflame tensions in the region if Moscow gets its way on this issue.

“‘No’ in Bucharest will be very clearly seen by some people in Moscow as their success, and it will be very clearly seen in Moscow that they have indirect veto right on NATO decisions,” he said on Wednesday (26 March).

From all our experience with Russians, the most effective policy with Russians is policy based on principles, not on appeasement,” he added.

At the five years’ mark, we still think that deposing Saddam was right - staying in Iraq for oil was wrong. Investing that over half trillion dollars waisted (costs are already over $800 billion considering also the fight to depose Saddam) in creating an economy less dependent on oil would have been a much more reasoned choice. What now?

www.SustainabiliTank.info posts the following Washington Post article as a memorial to what we were saying since the start of our website. Sure - the surge has started to work, but to what end? Will the US be able to hold Iraq together as one state common to all its communities? Is it really important to have it as one integrated oil exporting source, at a time that we will anyway start to decrease our economy’s dependence on oil? After removing Saddam we could have left the Iraqi’s to sort out their future by themselves. Had they come up with a Saddam-alike, the US could have gone in a third time - less cost and nothing lost. If the US still insists in keeping Iraq in one piece - will this not push the country even more into future collusion with Iran? The Shiia are the majority and the only part of Iraq that really seeks independence are the Kurds. Why hold them back from achieving their goal? Even Turkey starts to understand that a secure Kurdistan, cards played right, could be to their advantage, and the EU, without pressure from the US, would also shine some light in that direction. The Sunni monarchs of the League of Arab States are yet years away from understanding the emerging new neighborhood in which extreme religious interpretation is bound to highjack also their own states - this because they had that false hope that the oil-money can help them deflect the ire of their own people to targets abroad - the likes of Israel, and even their own benefactor - the United States. This sounds sick - but sick it is. It was that oil-money, that to different degrees, paved the way and paid for the radicalization of the world’s two billion Muslims.

And what did all of this do to the value of the dollar and to US economy at large?

Surely, The Washington Post does not make our points, but then it presents a reasonable description of how sad America feels on this day - after five years of war and just one year after the start of a real attempt to manage that war.

The EU Observer looks into the damages the continuation of the war did to EU-US relations and to the split it created within the EU. What is the value loss to the US from above? How long will take the healing process?