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

Supporting Greening with Agri-Environmental Measures: Improvement or rather a waste of money?

The concept of Greening of Direct Payments and more specifically the Ecological Focus Area (EFA) are going into their second year of implementation. I will discuss the pragmatic option to additionally support EFA by agri-environmental measures (AEM) in order to improve effectiveness of EFA. The experience in Germany do not deliver strong arguments for this option. The advantage of this option is the application within the existing CAP-framework.

One effective EFA-option: Flouring strip with phacelia in Lindau, South 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