The Agency for Restructuring
and Modernisation of Agriculture (ARMA)

Twinning is a program financed by the European Commission, thanks to which the candidate countries to the European Union can receive substantive assistance from countries that are already EU members. Twinning projects are mainly implemented through specialist training and study visits.

On January 13 this year, hearings of two rival consortia were held in front of representatives of the European Commission and Serbia. After the analysis, it was decided that the Serbs would learn from Poles, Lithuanians and French. More precisely - from experts from the ARMA, agricultural paying agencies of Lithuania and France and the ministries of agriculture of these two countries.

As part of the project, which will last for two years, Serbs are to receive comprehensive knowledge about the functioning of agricultural markets in the European Union, necessary for their organization in Serbia, legal regulations and administrative solutions. The European Commission allocated 1.8 million euros for this. The project is scheduled to start in April 2022.

This is not the first time that ARMA shares its experience and knowledge gained during the eighteen years of EU membership. The Agency has so far participated in five twinning programs: twice for Moldova and Azerbaijan and once for Croatia. ARMA experts also participated in the project for Romania.

The ARMA project is part of Poland's growing activity in the Western Balkans region in recent years. This involvement is both political, which was manifested, inter alia, by the presidency of the Republic of Poland in the Berlin Process in 2019, and technical, including practical support for the countries of the region in the field of European integration, consisting in transferring, with the support of the coordinating role of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland, own experiences of system transformation and the pre- and post-accession period.

The ARMA project will be the second such large twinning project in recent years to be implemented by Polish institutions in Serbia. In September 2021, a joint UOKiK (Office of Competition and Consumer Protection) project with partners from Germany and Slovakia was launched, devoted to strengthening the local system of consumer protection. Serbia also remains Poland's largest development partner in the region. In 2021, 6 projects in the areas of health protection, education and environmental protection were implemented in Serbia with the funds of Polish development aid. This year, thanks to the decision of the Prime Minister, an additional 3 million PLN will be allocated to development aid for the Western Balkans region. In November 2021, as part of the joint fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, the Polish side handed over a total of over 700,000 to the countries of the Western Balkans. Coronavirus vaccines. Students from the Western Balkans, in turn, take part in the scholarship program of S. Banach, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland once again funded scholarships for students from the region to study at the College of Europe in Natolin.