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.

Implementation of CAP-reform 2013: The single country overview

As already described in my last post, I did a detailed review on the decision of the EU-member on how to use the three flexibility elements of the CAP-reform 2013. I focused on 1.) the re-coupling of direct payments, 2.) the reallocation of funds between the pillars and 3.) the redistribution options. The EU-member-states have to report their final decision until August 1, 2014. There has been a discussion whether the flexibility elements improve or if they deteriorate the CAP-reform 2013. Therefore, it might be useful, to get an overview on how countries use this flexibility.

Here is the table overview on the CAP-reform-implementation in the single member-states.

These information were gathered by internet-search, Agra Europe (diff. Issues), and by the support of different experts and colleagues of mine. Therefore great thanks to: Alex Lotman (Estonia), Oana Tanasache (Romania), Sebastian Hess (Sweden), Ewa Rabinowicz (Sweden) Anne van Doorn (Netherlands), Marian Stuiver (Netherlands), Sergio Araujo Enciso (Spain), Tomás García Azcárate (Spain) and Thelma Brenes Muñoz (expert for Portugal!). Besides this, I received responses on my requests and support from the ministries of Poland, Czech Republic, Greece, Finland and Hungary, thanks a lot for supporting this search!

This table is presented according my best knowledge, so no guarantee on the details. Any comments, questions, corrections or further information are welcomed: slakner@gwdg.de

A very interesting and detailed timeline for the implementation in United Kingdom from DEFRA can be found here: CAP-reform timeline UK.