The government aims to increase the number of small and medium-sized enterprises that produce and offer goods and services for export from the current 2,000 to 12,000, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Saturday.

Attending the inauguration ceremony of a new food processing plant in Nyírgelse, northeast Hungary, the Prime Minister said that according to the Eximbank database, there are about 2,000 Hungarian SMEs who currently export their own goods and services. According to experts, the economy will be able to fully support itself and will become fully competitive only after this number grows to 12,000, Viktor Orbán said.

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The Prime Minister explained that it is not simply for reasons of economic soundness that it is right for the backbone of the Hungarian economy to be made up of businesses that are in Hungarian hands, but also for reasons of national pride. We Hungarians have inherited farmland with some of the best capabilities in Europe, the climate is good, our soil is excellent and the level of industrial pollution is still extremely low, added to which the fact that we have centuries of expertise in the field all means that Hungarians are excellent farmers, Mr. Orbán said.

The Prime Minister reminded its audience of the fact that the government had fought grand battles in the interests of the Hungarian economy within the framework of the European Union, such as to protect the level of funding for the poultry sector. As a result, the EU permitted the continued payment of animal welfare support to the sector until 2018m thus enabling the doubling of current funding for poultry farmers.

In the next seven years, the regulations on the distribution of funding for developing the economy will change significantly – it will be much easier to handle and it will require much less bureaucracy to obtain funds, 60% of which will be linked to investments within the economy, the Prime Minister concluded.

(Prime Minister’s Office)