GERB-SDS lawmakers oppose merging the Executive Agency for Fisheries and Aquaculture (IARA) into the Executive Forests Agency. MP Galya Vasileva set out the position in a statement she read from the parliamentary rostrum. IARA is based in Burgas.

Vasileva said an agency that is absorbed by another body stops being an independent state authority, and that is exactly what is planned for IARA.

The Ministry of Agriculture has officially set out its reasons for the change. Vasileva said it wants leaner structures, lower costs, fewer layers of management and tighter control.

The statement says the ministry contradicts itself. It admits that even after the merger, specific knowledge and skills will be needed and that expertise must not shrink. So why should IARA lose its independence, the group asks.

Vasileva said an administration should change when it does not work well, so that it is closer to people, easier to reach, with less red tape and more efficient. She added that a reform makes sense only if it is first clear what the problem is, how it will be solved and what will improve afterwards.

She said IARA is more than a specialised administration. A new set of rules cannot overnight create a body that can do work it has never done before.

"IARA staff are not a cost line in a table, they are part of the state's capacity," the group's statement says.

The easiest thing is to call the decision "optimisation", merge the two bodies and report fewer staff, Vasileva said. It is far harder to build an institution, train people and earn expertise and trust, she said, and IARA has already done that.

She said she will not accept that IARA staff in Burgas and the whole sector should pay the price for a lack of clear direction from management. She called on the ministry to seriously consider letting IARA continue as an independent agency.

GERB-SDS said it will defend the agency's future today just as firmly as it defended its seat in Burgas some time ago.

IARA employees said in October that they would protest outside the Regional Administration building in Burgas on 5 October. The organisers, the Podkrepa regional trade union, said the protest is against a possible change to the agency's status and aims to keep it independent.

"More than 10 years ago we fought for IARA to be in Burgas, because we knew why its place is there," Vasileva said.