Ecological Focus Area 2016: Data from Lower Saxony suggest low impact

New data from Lower Saxony on the registration of ecological focus area (EFA) of the season 2016 are published now and the data show almost no changes: The EFA is still an expensive measure for taxpayers with low impact on the biodiversity. The first results of the implementation of the Ecological Focus Area (EFA) of 2015 were disappointing from an ecological point of view. But as always with new policy measures, there are a lot of child’s diseases to observe: There were a lot of administrative problems and obstacles and information deficits. In 2015, there were more precise information information by the ministries and the extension services could work and give recommendation to farmers. So the question is, whether farmers would implement more effective measures and whether the performance of EFA has been improved in the second year.

Line of trees as landscape element in Southern Lower Saxony

Greening 2015: First preliminary data show necessity for further reform

As one main element of the EU’s CAP-Reform 2013, the Greening of EU Direct Payments has been implemented for in 2015 the first year. In the last weeks some first data on the implementation of Greening and the Ecological Focus Area (EFA) were unofficially presented by the EU Commission. I want to share these data and do a bit of commenting on them.

Ploughing on the Island of Föhr, in 2016 in Northern Germany

Ecological Focus Area in Germany: The Full Dataset

Today, the German Ministry for Food and Agriculture published the press-release No. 191 with the full-dataset on the registration of ‚Ecological Focus Area‚ by farmers in 2015 in Germany. The data mainly confirm the rather low impact of greening and ecological focus area on biodiversity.

Greening and Ecological Focus Area: First Data on Decisions in Germany

Some weeks ago, we asked on this blog how farmers would implement Greening 2015 and which options they would choose in order to comply with the criterion of the ‘ecological focus area (EFA)’. The main message was that farmers would probably prefer to use the options of catch crops, nitrogen-fixing crops and fallow land, since they provide cost-advantages against the classical biodiversity options such as buffer-strips and landscape elements. This expectation was also based on the fact, that the latter go alongside with legal insecurity. In addition, structural policies and the practise of direct-payments before 2013 lead to a situation, where farmers would rather exclude landscape elements from their registered farm land. Overall, the expectation was that landscape-elements and buffer-strips (as the most effective options to support biodiversity) would hardly be chosen by farmers.

EFA Fallow land in the region of Göttingen

Implementation of CAP-reform 2013: Update on the single country overview

The CAP-reform contains some flexible elements, where the EU member states can decide, which options to implement into the national legal framework. These flexible elements were to be reported by the EU-member states to the EU-Commission until August 2014. Last year, I published a preliminary overview on my blog, that was requested a lot (see CAP Implementation an Overview of April 2014). In December 2014 I did a second round of eMail-request to different ministries for agriculture, where I had no information and got a few answers again (Thanks to the ministries of Denmark, Lithuania and Cyprus!). The EU-Commission was also busy and recently published an The CAP towards 2020 Implementation of the new system of direct payments MS notifications, which is especially detailed on voluntary coupled payments and contains also the option taken on greening-regulations.

Today, I am completing the list of country decisions based EU-Commission publication, and also on the information provided by the ministries. You can find in the attached list the single country decisions with respect to a.) voluntary coupled support, b.) Reallocation between Pillars and c.) Degressivity / redistribution. In some cases I added links to interesting government documents, however, that is not a complete link list. Many ministries websites are very detailed and provide complete information even in English. Other websites are rather poor and contain rather confusing informations. Here is the Tabelle CAP-Implementation – Version 2b. (PDF-file). If you have questions or comments on this, let me know, I hope the list of country decisions is useful. I am also working on a qualitative assessment of the flexibility elements, which will (hopefully) be published soon.

Another Assessment has been done by Kaley Hart from the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP): Member State choices on Pillar 1 implementation revealed.

The Implementation of the CAP-Reform 2013 – an actual overview

A. Flexibility options of the EU-member-states

In December 2013, EU-Parliament and Council could reach an agreement on the main issues of the CAP-Reform 2013. The final EU-Regulation 1307/2013 is already published in the Official Journal of the European Union. Some of the main issues of the reform allow a lot of flexibility for the single EU-member-states. The following article will go into details which of the options are going to be used by the EU-member-states.

Extensive grassland in rural Bulgaria