Estonia is prepared to increase its contribution to the European Union’s next long-term (2021-2027) budget. The government said it supports increases in the priority areas of security, defence external cooperation and neighbourhood policy.
Also, the Estonian government finds that the reduction in the budgets of cohesion policy, rural development and common agricultural policy should not be too big.
As reported by the English-language online portal of Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR), the government is also prepared to increase Estonia’s contribution to the EU budget to mitigate potential cuts proposed by the European Commission to the financing of cohesion policy and agricultural policy. Thus, the government is in favour of the size of the new long-term budget being as close as possible to the current one, which means that the budget for 2021-2027 should be bigger than the initial proposal tabled by the Commission.
According to Estonia’s government, when standard of living increases, the reduction in subsidies should not be as steep as put forward in the current proposal.
ERR also reported that while a moderate increase in the rate of own contribution supports the well-considered spending of money, the increase in the rate of own contribution for countries becoming a transition region should be smaller and not threefold as suggested in the Commission’s proposal.
Decisions regarding what to use EU funding for should be made on the regional level and in consideration of their development needs.
The position of the Estonian government is that direct agricultural support should ensure equal competition conditions on European markets for agricultural producers of all EU member states.
