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.

In November, 2005, she was named ‘commissioner of the year’ in the European Voice’s Europeans of the Year poll, for unrelenting efforts to shift EU spending towards areas that would enhance competitiveness, such as research and development.

The 52-year-old, who graduated as an economist at Leningrad University in 1983, became Lithuania’s finance minister in 2002.

She speaks several languages, and played a big role in negotiating Lithuania’s accession to the EU. Her black belt in karate could come in handy if protesting farmers get too close during the coming EU budget negotiations.

However, Lithuania’s faltering economy could intervene. There is speculation that Grybauskaite could return to politics in her native country in order to help repair its damaged finances, perhaps as prime minister or president.