Budget commissioner Grybauskaite is long an opponent of farm funding
Like everyone in the new EU member states, the Lithuanian is no stranger to huge economic reforms — the fall of Communism, adapting first to liberalism, then to EU laws. So they are unimpressed with the slow pace of reform in the EU.
“If, in the future, we continue with the same proportions, giving only one sector, agriculture, half of the budget, the EU will not be able to tackle its needs at all, no matter how much we will put into the budget,” said Grybauskaité in a 2004 interview with euractiv.com.