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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The management of EU agri-environment support policy has improved in two decades

The European Court of Auditors published its special report No 7/2011 on whether agri-environment support policy is well designed and managed . According to them, the management of this policy has improved over the years. It's good news because the agri-environment support policy is one of the main policies of the EU, which spends 2.5 billion euros per year.This European Court of Auditors’ (ECA) performance audit assessed whether this rural development measure is well designed and managed by addressing the following questions: Is agri-environment policy designed and monitored so as to deliver tangible environmental benefits? Are farmers well supported through appropriate guidance and correct aid amounts? Does the management of agri-environment policy take account of specific environmental needs?

Notwithstanding the significant progress that has been made in the 20 years since the policy was first introduced, the audit concluded that:

- The objectives were overall too vague to be useful for assessing the extent to which they have been achieved; the policy was not designed and monitored so as to deliver tangible environmental benefits.

- The systems for providing guidance to farmers were generally well implemented. However, considerable problems were identified concerning the aid amounts, ranging from shortcomings in their calculation to a lack of differentiation according to regional or local site conditions.

- Member States are required to make support available in accordance with specific needs. They had not considered the desirable degree of targeting to their needs on the basis of an analysis of costs and benefits involved.

The ECA makes a series of recommendations in its special report to improve the implementation of agri-environment policy. The Commission should consider for the next programming period whether expenditure should be more precisely targeted to specific environmental needs; while the Member States should collect and report relevant and reliable data on environmental benefits and use it for monitoring purposes. While the Court found that farmers are generally well supported through appropriate guidance, it recommends that the dissemination of good practices be improved.

Source  Press room - European Commission

More information  Press room - European Commission

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