Katalin Toth
Scientific Officer
Joint Research Centre, Monitoring Agricultural Resources Unit
Italy

Abstract
Green and Geospatial (The Common Agricultural Policy After the Reform)

Co-Authors:
LOUDJANI, Philippe, Team Leader, European Commission, DG Joint Research Centre, Monitoring Agricultural Resources Unit
DEVOS, Wim, Scientific Officer, European Commission, DG Joint Research Centre, Monitoring Agricultural Resources Unit

The Common Agricultural Policy is among the oldest policies of the EU. Its current priorities aim at maintaining a stable supply of safe and affordable food and at ensuring farmers' reasonable living. Among the CAP reforms the last ones made it greener and more geospatial. The objectives, tools, and measures for CAP implementation are laid down in the legal acts, adopted by the European Council and the Parliament and, by delegation, the European Commission. One of the main instruments of the CAP are the so-called direct payments to farmers. Between 2014 and 2020, approximately 38% of EU budget will be devoted to agriculture and rural development. The bigger part of this appropriation, roughly 40-42 billion Euro go to direct payments. In order to manage aid applications, payments, and the related controls, each Member State has to establish an Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS), where spatial data play essential role. The identification system of agricultural parcels, a.k.a LPIS, is used to identify and quantify agricultural land based on land cover and possible land use. As from 2018, farmers have to submit their aid application using geospatial methods, which means that the position and the size of their parcels have to be derived from geometries captured either on orthoimagery or in the field. “Greening" the other novelty of the CAP, is conditioning a part of the direct payments to practices beneficial for the climate and environment. Greening is mandatory for farmers whose holding exceeds set thresholds. It introduces crop diversification, the maintenance of permanent grassland, and the establishment of specific ecological focus areas. These new aspects make on-the-spot checks more complex and will likely require the introduction of additional technical methods, such as analysis of time series of remote sensing images, stereo photogrammetry and geotagged documentation of field observations.
The new challenges require both a holistic approach and a strong convergence with spatial data infrastructures. To do so, DGJRC of the European Commission offers good practice examples and promotes technology that is standard based and fully interoperable with INSPIRE.