"The People's Party has appealed to the President with a recommendation to declare 2006 the Year of the Village in Ukraine. Perhaps for the first time, from promises at the national level we will move to concrete deeds," Ihor Yeremeyev, head of the People's Party faction in the Verkhovna Rada, told Volyn journalists on 16 July. "When we came to parliament in 2002, the village budget was 1 billion hryvnias. The following year we secured 2 billion 400 thousand. In the third year it was already 4 billion 600 thousand. And this year it was supposed to be 9 billion 800 thousand hryvnias. But the new government, while creating a social budget, broke this structure for us," Ihor Yeremeyev explained the people's party members' position regarding the village. According to him, 10 percent should be allocated in the 2006 budget for support of the village. "The problem for the state is that with an incorrect approach to the economy, funds are taken out of the country. If we provide a subsidy of 10 billion hryvnias for the village, these funds will not disappear from the country. They go directly to ordinary people. And these people do not take money to foreign accounts," the people's deputy explained. Ihor Yeremeyev cited the example of the draft law on meat intervention, for which the "people's party members" did not vote. "The draft law on meat intervention allowed the State Reserve Committee to purchase imported meat abroad and bring it into the territory of Ukraine without paying duty and VAT, and at the expense of this intervention to make meat cheaper for the population. But let us analyze more deeply. We would be subsidizing Argentina with State Budget funds, that is, the money of our taxpayers, which has the problem of where to put its meat. We subsidize Argentina, import its meat, lower prices and thus simply cut down our own agricultural producer, and this is 40 percent of Ukraine's population. Would it not be better to direct these funds in the form of subsidies to support our own producer? Then we will create conditions under which he will have an incentive to keep more cattle. In this way we will saturate our market, and, again, this will automatically lead to a reduction in the price of meat," Ihor Yeremeyev believes.