The European Commission has failed to harness the potential of big data to analyse and then guide the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the European Court of Auditors regrets in a report published on Tuesday 28 June.
The Commission certainly holds large volumes of data relevant to the design, monitoring and evaluation of the CAP. However, for the auditors, the tools and data it currently uses do not provide it with all the elements necessary for informed policy-making at EU level.
The Commission therefore lacks sufficient evidence to fully assess the needs and impact of the CAP.
The CAP accounts for more than a third of the EU budget - €408 billion for the period 2014-2020. In order to be able to assess whether CAP instruments contribute effectively to these objectives and to establish a causal link between a CAP measure and its results, the Commission needs data and information from a wide range of sources.
“A well-developed policy is a data-driven policy, and big data is becoming the gold standard in agriculture”, said Joëlle Elvinger, the member of the Court of Auditors responsible for the report. “The European Commission should further exploit the potential of big data to base the analysis of the CAP on a large amount of evidence”, she added.
The objective of the audit was to assess whether the Commission was making appropriate use of data and analysis for the analysis of the CAP, an assessment which is relevant both for the CAP that takes effect in 2023 and for the CAP post-2027.
However, the data and tools currently in use do not provide important data (e.g. on environmental practices adopted and on off-farm income) necessary for an informed design of the CAP.
The Commission has taken several initiatives, including legislative ones, to ensure that the data collected is better used.
However, DG AGRI still analyses data collected from EU countries manually using traditional tools such as spreadsheets and does not use big data techniques for text mining and automated extraction. Furthermore, it has no automated or semi-automated processing tools to analyse this data. However, the auditors demonstrate that increased automation is possible and that there are potential benefits in replacing time-consuming manual procedures.
The Court recommends establishing a framework for the use of disaggregated data from Member States and broadening and diversifying the sources of data available to meet the needs of the CAP. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)