On 6 September, a meeting was held at the Lviv Agricultural Chamber with representatives of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations – Vasyl Kvartuk, Programme Evaluation Consultant, and Hanna Antoniuk, Head of the FAO Office in Lviv.

During the meeting, issues of cooperation with farms in the Lviv region were discussed within the framework of the second cycle of FAO and EU grant support for milk production and processing, berry growing and vegetable growing.

In particular, Hanna Antoniuk noted that only 40 per cent of all grant applications submitted were selected by the selection committee for implementation. The main reasons for rejecting grant applications were failure to meet the criteria for farms’ participation in the grant programme. The most common errors included farms having too little or too much land under cultivation, exceeding the permitted size of the dairy herd, and an unjustified list of equipment required to carry out the planned work, among others.

               Vasyl Kvartuk briefed the meeting participants on the main requirements for monitoring the implementation of grant support programmes and the use of monitoring results to improve the grant award mechanism in future grant programme cycles.

             Ihor Vuytsyk, Chairman of the Lviv Agrarian Chamber, spoke about the experience of cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in humanitarian programmes, and on cooperation with farms regarding the preparation of applications for participation in the FAO and EU grant programme, and put forward specific proposals for improving the conditions for providing grant support to farms.

         The meeting participants also discussed promising areas for cooperation between the FAO and the Lviv Agrarian Chamber in the context of carrying out monitoring tasks and implementing the next cycles of grant programmes in the Lviv region.