In a report published on Thursday 26 February, the EU’s Court of Auditors found that the potential of the European instrument for boosting agricultural productivity and sustainability through innovation, the EIP-AGRI, is falling short of its full potential.
According to the auditors, although almost €1 billion of European and national funding has been earmarked between 2014 and 2022 to support innovative farming practices under this tool, “useful, specific or widely adopted innovations have been fairly rare”.
While this tool supported more than 4,000 projects under the 2014–2022 CAP, according to the Court, innovation potential was rarely a decisive criterion in project selection and, generally speaking, farmers’ participation was limited, as was the attention paid to their innovation needs.
In addition, almost a third of the projects examined (70 in total, in Spain, France, the Netherlands and Poland) did not relate directly to farming.
In addition, more than half of the projects fell short of generating successful innovations and, in many cases, the projects produced no practical results, met niche needs or essentially used public funds for own benefit.
The auditors also found situations where public funds supported investments that would have been made anyway, without any real benefit to the sector as a whole.
Furthermore, only about half of the projects resulted in the sharing of the knowledge acquired, and only six of the 18 projects that produced useful results led to innovations that were widely adopted. In Spain, for example, a project involving dry-sowing techniques for rice led to the adoption of this technique throughout an entire region of the country.
Finally, according to the auditors, synergies with Horizon 2020 funding had not been exploited: none of the 70 projects examined made use of Horizon 2020, even though more than €1.5 billion had been allocated for agricultural and forestry research over 2014–2020.
The Court therefore recommends that the practical needs of farmers be better targeted, that project selection procedures be strengthened and that the dissemination of results be improved so that the whole sector can benefit from innovation.
Read the report: https://aeur.eu/f/kxr (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)