The world’s growing population is forcing us to find ways to optimise our food resources and come up with smart solutions for sustainable agriculture and rural development. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management (MAFWM) in Serbia is working on developing new strategies and policies for various disciplines to respond to this alarming issue. We are helping the ministry to align its efforts and agencies with EU regulations and strengthen its responses at national and global level.

Getting the required legislation in place

The first step in this nationwide reform initiative was to put relevant legislation in place and provide guidelines for the actors involved. We helped the ministry compile a set of policy documents as a platform for future steps, including the following documents, which are the most relevant for the accession negotiations in agriculture and rural development, food safety, and veterinary and phytosanitary policy:

• Negotiation positions for Chapters 11 and 12
• Action Plans for Chapters 11 and 12
• European Green Deal
• Impact assessment of the future implementation of the EU Common Agricultural Policy
• Analysis report on external registers
• Functional analysis of the MAFWM

In addition to these documents, we helped national experts develop new pieces of legislation, including laws on:

• State Aid in Agriculture
• Seed and Planting Materials
• Veterinary Matters
• Food Safety
• Official Control
• Plant Health.

Thanks to these new pieces of legislation, policies and strategies, Serbia is not only strengthening its national legal framework but is also laying the ground for improved agricultural practices, further development of rural areas, safer food and better veterinary and phytosanitary applications.

Nationwide campaign

These legislative documents and policies would be simply put away and forgotten without a trained force of people actually implementing what they mean in the field. With that in mind, we have organised a series of capacity-building events and materials to help grow the knowledge and skills of Serbian workforce, who will be the people who actually make the real difference in these areas. This capacity building included study visits to other countries to learn from their experiences; on-the-job training for practical skills; workshops and conferences to inspire and foster peer-to-peer learning, and activities and materials to raise public awareness.

Over 2,000 people were trained and are now actively turning the legislation and policies into concrete actions and results.

Preparing for the future

Our experts prepared a set of recommendations for the ministry to help local farmers make better use of the funds available, such as the IPARD (Pre-Accession Assistance Rural Development). We also prepared reports on how the national framework could be further improved to align its regulations and implementation methods with those of the European Union.