Brussels, 07/04/2016 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission should develop a “more comprehensive” statistical framework to provide information on the disposable income of farm households and to better capture the standard of living of farmers, said the Court of Auditors of the EU in a report published on Thursday 7 April evaluating the measurement of the support for farmers' incomes.
The Court assessed whether the system put in place by the Commission to measure performance in relation to farmers' incomes is well-designed and based on sound data. It concluded that the Commission's system to measure the performance of the common agricultural policy (CAP) with regard to farmers' incomes “is not sufficiently well-designed and the quantity and quality of statistical data used to analyse farmers' incomes has significant limitations”.
The audit highlighted, too, that: the Commission has not clearly established the statistical data needed to effectively assess the performance of CAP measures in support of farmers' incomes; no representative data are available on the disposable income of farm households, which would facilitate assessing the achievement of the treaty objective of ensuring a fair standard of living for farmers; and neither is there a reliable system to allow comparisons to be made between agricultural incomes and those in other sectors of the economy, which could justify EU income support for farmers.
The main tools currently available at EU level for measuring farmers' incomes are the economic accounts for agriculture (EAAs) and the farm accountancy data network (FADN). The EAAs are the Commission's main statistical source for monitoring farmers' incomes globally at macroeconomic level. However “their potential has not yet been fully used and they are not sufficiently informative about important factors that are relevant for farmers' incomes, as well as for the economic value of agriculture as a whole”, the Court report says. The FADN is an important instrument for the evaluation of the CAP but, according to the Court, it has limitations, because it covers only commercial holdings and income information is incomplete.
The Commission and member states did not always ensure that the data used for the measurement of farmers' incomes were of appropriate quality, the Court goes on. It found weaknesses in the management of both the EAAs and the FADN by the Commission and the member states. In addition “quality assurance procedures for the EAAs are not yet fully effective, while the audit identified certain weaknesses in the quality assurance arrangements for the FADN”.
The Court goes further: it is of the view that the vague objectives of certain CAP measures and the absence of a baseline “make it difficult to assess whether individual CAP measures aimed at the support of farmers' incomes have achieved their objectives”. It says the Commission has also not defined relevant indicators for an effective performance measurement and those indicators on which the Commission has to build its assessment “are not sufficiently reliable or are not linked clearly enough to CAP measures and, as such, are not useful to show whether they contributed effectively and efficiently towards the desired effects and reduced income disparities”.
The incomes and standard of living of farmers are a particular focus of the treaty and the 2013 reform of the common agricultural policy (CAP). Almost one third of the EU budget is still directly or indirectly dedicated to supporting farmers' incomes and thus contributing to ensuring a fair standard of living for farmers. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)