Marcel Spatar
According to him, the Common Agricultural Policy is one of the EU’s fundamental policies and receives the largest share of funding from the European budget.
“I believe that Moldovan villages have a future, because their development is largely tied to the development of agriculture. The European Union subsidizes agricultural development. In principle, the Common Agricultural Policy is one of the European Union’s fundamental policies. It has the largest budget in the European Union. And the philosophy behind this policy is that industrial Europe still needs to eat. And that is why developed regions subsidize the development of agriculture. And farmers in Europe—I think people who are involved in this know it well—have developed very well recently thanks to this. “Agriculture in Europe is sustained by this subsidy system,” the MP stated on Exclusiv TV.
Responding to a question about the “demographic pit” Moldova has found itself in, Spatari urged people to “choose their terminology carefully.” According to him, despite the population decline, the republic’s population density remains higher than in a number of European countries:
“There are still people…”
“Demographic pit… What is a pit? A pit is when there’s no one left. But there are still people in our country. Let me put it this way: the population density of the Republic of Moldova is currently higher than that of the Baltic states, higher than that of Bulgaria, and close to that of Croatia, for example.”
Still, the MP acknowledges that since the 1990s, the population density has fallen by nearly half.
“In the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Moldova’s population density was the highest among all the republics of the Soviet Union. Back then, we had something like 140, 145 people per square kilometer; today, it’s 70. That’s half as much, of course. I understand that people left; it was a tragedy for many families. I’m certainly not saying there’s no population decline. There is a decline. We must work on this. We must create living conditions that will encourage people to stay in Moldova. But we still need to choose our terminology carefully,” concluded Marcel Spatari.
The MP emphasized that similar processes are taking place in other European countries. He also drew attention to internal migration and urbanization, which are causing residents to move from villages to cities.
