Heads of government will meet in Brussels tomorrow for a two-day European Council summit aimed at ironing out details of EU expansion and to debate the final hurdles to enlargement.
Among the main topics on the agenda is the amount of structural and cohesion funds that each candidate country will receive and the potentially explosive issue of agriculture and any transitional measures required.
While Malta is lobbying to ensure it receives more funds from the EU in the first three years of membership, the EU Reporter newspaper reported yesterday that France is likely to press for lower allocations of structural and cohesion funds to candidate countries during the summit.
Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami had said earlier this month that Malta would receive less than Lm3 million each year in the first three years of membership, a figure he described as "a pittance".
Meanwhile, Malta still has to close the agriculture chapter and in the report called 'Towards an Enlarged Union', which was released by the European Commission earlier this month, it was noted that Malta needed to do more in the agriculture sector.
The report noted that there has been some legislative progress in agriculture, but litte porgess in terms of administrative capacity.
Malta still has to adopt considerable parts of the agriculture acquis, and in order to be ready for membership it also needs to give urgent attention to the restructuring policies associated with the dismantling of levies and to devolving marketing responsibilities from the state to the farmers.
The issue of funds for the agricultural reform in the candidate countries has long been a heated debate with sceptics in EU member states predicting that enlargment will send the costs spiralling.
However, speaking during his visit to the Netherlands on Monday, Franz Fischler, Commissioner for Agriculture, Rurual Development and Fisheries, insisted that "enlargement will not trigger cost explosion".
Mr Fischler said that the Common Agricultural Policy had to be changed to make it more in tune with modern-day society and the commission's proposals respected the EU farm budget unanimously fixed by the heads of state until 2006.
Mr Fischler warned those who linked the enlargement negotiations to the discussions on the farm reform that this would result in delays.
"Those who want to do so should also have the courage to spell out what this means in practice: delaying enlargement. I will not allow agriculture to become the scapegoat for those who want to turn the debate on enlargement into a pure 'piggy-bank operation'," he said.
"A larger EU costs money. But the costs are manageable. The commission's strategy to finance enlargement fully respects the amounts foreseen by the heads of state, although in 1999, only six new member states were foreseen and we now have to accommodate 10 with the same amount of money," he said.
Mr Fischler said that the cost explosion predicted by some doomsayers would simply not happen. For 2006, the commission foresees €16 billion for the 10 new member states. The majority of this will not go to agriculture.
"About €10.35 billion, or 65 per cent, of the financial package are necessary for structural fund measures and only €4 billion, or 25 per cent, will be used to finance the farm policy in the new member states," he said.
"This means that in 2006 the 15 EU member states would have to use only 1.08 per cent of the GDP to finance the budget of an enlarged union of 25 members. Consider that the maximum agreed by the member states was fixed at 1.27 per cent of the EU's GDP," he pointed out.