The European Union’s member states are at odds over funding for the EU’s cohesion policy, which is supposed to reduce the wealth gap between richer and poorer regions.

At a meeting in Luxembourg today (24 April), European affairs ministers from 13 countries, primarily in central and eastern Europe, opposed calls from net contributors to the EU’s budget, such as Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK for additional cuts in cohesion funding in the EU’s multi-annual financial framework for 2014-20.

The ministers said that the European Commission’s proposal would cut cohesion funding from €354 billion in the current multi-annual spending plan (2007-13) to €336bn for 2014-20.

“Given the challenges in terms of economic, social and territorial cohesion, and existing disparities which are further aggravated by the economic crisis, we consider the Commission’s proposal as an absolute minimum,” the 13 ministers said in a statement.

The group is led by Poland and comprises the three Baltic states plus Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia, as well as Croatia, which will join the EU in the summer of 2013.

The ministers called for a “complete” debate on the main spending items in the EU’s budget – cohesion policy and the Common Agricultural Policy. “We should discuss all the important elements of the MFF at the same time,” the statement said. “All instruments of the EU budget should be subject to the same rigorous approach. If there were to be cuts to the EU budget, no policy/budget instrument should be a priori exempted.”

Cohesion funding and the CAP account for around three-quarters of the EU budget.

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