EU rural development and 'semi-literate farmers'

An ambitious policy: “The EU’s rural development policy is all about meeting the challenges faced by our rural areas, and unlocking their potential.”

Especially the ‘new’ EU member states hoped to benefit from these funding programmes after joining the EU.

Here is Alina Mungiu Pippidi‘s ‘Romanian reality check’ taken from her forthcoming book “A tale of two villages“:

… nobody seems competent enough to fill in one of those complex application forms with many rubrics, seemingly designed to exclude the semi-literate farmers of the underdeveloped, rural areas for which those programme were in fact intended.

via Book of the Week: Book of the Week | The Economist.