Budget commissioner Grybauskaite is long an opponent of farm funding

AS early as 2004, before she became EU Commissioner for financial programming and the budget, Dalia Grybauskaite said agriculture spending was the EU’s central budget problem.

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.