Brussels, 29/11/2012 (Agence Europe) - On 27 November, the European Court of Auditors published its first special report on income support paid to farmers in new member states. It is advocating reform that guarantees income support to farmers who genuinely and regularly work in farming. Public undertakings involved in managing land belonging to the state and which do not exercise any other agricultural activity should be excluded from EU agricultural support and no payment should be made for land that lies fallow or where non-agricultural activities are carried out.
The Single Agricultural Payments Scheme (SAPS) was set up to enable new member states that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 to support the incomes of their farmers. It is currently applied in ten EU member states and cost €5 billion in 2011. The Court of Auditors' report focuses on the beneficiaries of this policy, the eligible land and the contribution made by the scheme to the objective of supporting farmers' incomes.
The general conclusion of the audit explains that implementation of the scheme has led to a certain number of features with debatable merits: - the definition of policy beneficiaries is inappropriate: it allows payments to be made in favour of beneficiaries who exercise no agricultural activity or who are only involved in marginal farming activities; - in some of the countries, totally bone fide payments have been made to public undertakings in charge of land belonging to the state but which do not in any other respect exercise any agricultural activity. The state is the biggest beneficiary of the SAPS in Hungary; - not all eligible agricultural service areas receiving SAPS payments have been calculated reliably by member states but this has been validated by the Commission. This has had an impact on the amount of aid paid per hectare for each farmer and which were sometimes higher and sometimes lower than it should have been. Some countries have reviewed the totality of their agricultural surface areas without any sensible justification, which allowed them to use their respective financial envelopes to the full; - despite the efforts made by some of the countries concerned, aid has been paid for plots of land where no farming has been done at all; - as it is currently conceived, SAPS support contains an inherent contradiction: on the one hand, it is supposed to support the individual incomes of farmers, and on the other it is distributed between farms on the basis of surface area; - SAPS mainly benefits large farming concerns; - although SAPS was devised as a temporary scheme, the majority of member states are not prepared for implementation (planned for 2014) of the scheme (based on payment rights) already applied in EU15 member states. Significant payment delays could therefore occur in the future.
The Court of Auditors is recommending that the policy be better targeted and results oriented, so that it can support working farmers who really do carry out farming work on a regular basis and that it excludes public undertakings. The eligibility of support for land should also be clearly defined and limited to land that is effectively farmed on a regular basis. It will be necessary to distribute support in a more balanced way to farmers, either by capping very high individual payments or by taking into consideration specific considerations of farms in the different regions. The Commission should seek to rectify structural weaknesses affecting the agricultural sector and actively support member states, as well as closely following them in their preparations for the future introduction of a payments rights system. (OL/trans/fl)