2454 final report.pdf - Agra CEAS Consulting

Evaluation of the Community Plant Health Regime: Final Report
DG SANCO Evaluation Framework Contract Lot 3 (Food Chain)
used in practice for cases of replacement of destroyed trees in Spain and Italy in 2008 and
2009.
Traditionally, the financial support for the implementation of the CPHR (solidarity regime
and other expenditure headings, as discussed in section 2.9) has been drawn from the EAGGF
section of the CAP budget (pillar I).
Pillar II inter alia aims to provide incentives in new areas, including the provision of public
goods (such as maintaining attractive cultivated landscapes, contributing to the cultural
heritage of regions or enhancing the environment) and to meet various new challenges such as
climate change and biodiversity.
Finally, forestry measures 225, 226 and 227 under the Rural Development Regulation
1698/2005 256 grant support in specific cases as follows:
Pests and diseases prevention can be supported through measure 226 for restoring
forestry potential and introducing prevention actions, only if they are connected to
natural disasters or fire as the trigger for an outbreak;
In the event no connection can be made between the outbreak and a natural disaster or
fire but that it is considered as an exceptional outbreak, the application of forest
environmental payments or non-productive investment measures (225 and 227) can be
used for supporting the additional costs of environmental friendly prevention measures
compared with the "normal" prevention methods.
The decoupled direct payments introduced after the CAP Mid Term Review in 2003 are
linked to cross compliance standards, i.e. standards referring to a series of measures managed
either by DG ENV or by DG SANCO and applying to farmers. These are: Statutory
Management Requirements (SMR), Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions
(GAEC) as well as the Permanent Pasture Ratio.
‗Cross-compliance‘ links direct payments to farmers to their respect of these standards set at
EU and national levels. In the case of non-respect, direct payments can be reduced or
withheld. In the case of negligence, the overall payment to be withheld is set at a maximum of
5%, or 15% for repeated offences. For intentional non-compliance, the fine is not less than
20%, and may go as far as total exclusion from receipt of payment for one or more years. 25%
of the total receipts from cross-compliance penalties may be retained by the MS; the
remainder is re-credited to the main CAP budget.
Cross-compliance can therefore be considered as an incentive for farmers to correctly apply
measures managed by DG ENV or DG SANCO.
One of the GAEC standards concerns crop rotation. Considering that crop rotation is a
quarantine measure under the emergency measures for Diabrotica virgifera 257 , cross
256 Council Regulation (EC) No 1698/2005 of 20 September 2005 on support for rural development by the
European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD).
Food Chain Evaluation Consortium 264