As part of an effort to ease the administrative burden on farmers, the European Commission is set to propose that farms under 10ha in size can be exempted from conditionality under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
A document that has been prepared for the Council of the EU and the European Parliament, if adopted, would exempt small farmers having no more than 10ha of agricultural area from conditionality controls and penalties.
According to the leaked document, the purpose of this proposal is to alleviate the administrative burden linked to these controls, which is higher for small farms in comparison to larger farms.
It is understood that, if this proposed revision to CAP regulations is adopted, it will be for member states to decide if they want to implement these exemptions to CAP conditionality.
The proposal document says: “Farmers with a maximum size of holding not exceeding 10ha of agricultural area should in consequence not be controlled as regards the respect of Statutory Management Requirements (SMRs) under [EU] law and the Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAECs).
“As such small farmers represent 65% of CAP beneficiaries but account only for around 10% of the total agricultural area, this would simplify the work for many farmers while not hampering significantly the role of the conditionality requirements in contributing to the climate and environmental objectives,” the document says.
These farmers would also be exempted from the application of administrative penalties for non-compliance with the conditionality requirements.
The proposed changes would also provide for greater flexibility on some of the GAECs.
Member States will be allowed to provide specific exemptions from GAECs 5, 6 and 7 covering situations where there is a risk that the requirements would run counter to their objectives, for instance due to specific agronomic situations for crops on specific soil types.
The document says that the proposals have been tabled with “political urgency”, and aim “to a respond to a crisis situation in EU agriculture”.
The effort by the commission to reduce the administrative burden of farmers comes in response to a series of farmer protest throughout the EU, as well as several challenging economic and weather-related conditions in European agriculture.
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said in early February that the commission would develop a proposal to reduce the administrative burden on farmers in response to an ongoing wave of protests around the EU.
As part of those wider proposals, the commission launched an online survey to gather the views of EU farmers last week.
The survey, which will remain open until April 8, seeks to understand the workload placed on farmers by procedures and rules linked to the CAP, as well as other EU rules for food and agriculture, according to the commission.