The Cyprus Employers and Industrialists Federation (OEB) expresses its great satisfaction with the impressive response of businesses and its concern about the exhaustion within two hours of the available budget of €10.3 million. of the Intervention “Investments in the Processing and/or Marketing of Agricultural Products”.
OEB receives requests from businesses, which, despite the availability of mature and sustainable investment plans, have not been able to submit an application due to the rapid exhaustion of the budget. This fact proves the high demand and strong interest of the business world for investments in the critical sector of agricultural product processing, as well as the inadequacy of the available resources to meet the real needs of the market.
OEB had pointed out early on that the Intervention would attract extremely high interest and that the available resources would be sufficient for only a limited number of businesses. This fact will make it difficult to achieve the main objective of the program, which is to upgrade the Cypriot agri-food industry and, by extension, the primary sector.
For this reason, OEB had proposed to the two competent Ministries – Agriculture, Rural Development & Environment and Energy, Trade & Industry – the increase of the budget to at least €15 million, as was the case in previous programming periods, an amount that, in the opinion of OEB, was also low.
OEB again appeals to the competent authorities to proceed with the increase of the Intervention fund, in order to enable more businesses to implement investments and remains at their disposal for any cooperation that will contribute to the more effective use of European and national resources for the benefit of the Cypriot economy.
