Digital solutions and e-tools to modernise the CAP

The EU eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020 calls on the modernisation of public administrations in Europe and improving the interaction with citizens and businesses. This modernisation aims to reduce administrative burden on stakeholders, including farmers, based on the reuse of common services. A set of cross border services in key policy areas such as health, procurement, justice and identification have been successfully developed in the past through Large Scale Pilots. A key domain of application is the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

The EU's CAP delivers on a wide variety of social, environmental and economic goods. Due to its multiple dimensions, broad range of stakeholders involved and the large geographic area covered, the current governance system is complex. This results in high socio-economic costs for those involved and society at large. The current infrastructure governing the CAP direct payments (the Integrated Administration and Control Systems, IACS) which includes different realisations across Member States, contains important amounts of detailed and valuable data. However, to reduce the important gap between the use of these data currently limited to agriculture, and the potential broader uses (e.g. for monitoring environmental and climate policies) in combination with new technologies, ancillary space data and other data sources such as agri-environment-climate data while reducing socio-economic and administrative burden will require new forms of data interoperability and accessibility beyond the CAP. It is expected that the development of new cross-border services will have spill over effects for other fields of application.

Scope

The proposal should support the further development of the IACS, promoting extensive data and information flows between Member States, the European Commission and various other stakeholders.

The proposal should ensure that appropriate and relevant data collected at the source become a reliable additional input for subsequent processes of payment and performance monitoring. The cross-border dimension of this pilot is essential to define a pan-EU standardised IACS. The pilot should demonstrate how cross-border information could contribute to simplifying and rationalising the administrative process by reusing (open) data and contribute to increasing the overall social, economic and environmental performance of the CAP measures for all actors, including the farmers. The project will also identify the drivers, barriers, potential vulnerabilities and legal issues associated with implementing the new system in the EU that can be generalised to other fields of application.

The project will enable the interaction and co-creation based on the existing national systems, and will re-use if relevant existing cross-border services, in particular services operated by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) telecom programme. The action may involve financial support to third parties. The proposal will define the process of selecting entities for which financial support will be granted, typically in the order of EUR 40 000 – 300 000 per party. The free access to the foreground must be guaranteed to enable access by any Member State to the results specifications. In addition open source (EUPL "European Union Public Licence") should be used.

To demonstrate the robustness and the economic benefit, the project must pilot the system for at least 12 months in real conditions. The large-scale pilot shall include a minimum of six relevant national administrations (or legal entities designated to act on their behalf) from at least six different EU Member States. Projects are expected to fall under the concept of the multi-actor approach.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU up to EUR 10 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Expected Impact

Achieve a further integration and digitization of the EU CAP's governance infrastructure. The project shall:

• evaluate the reduction of the socio-economic costs and – barriers for a wide range of stakeholders involved in the implementation of the CAP;
• improve the potential of IACS to be used for monitoring, analyses and control, by incentivising administrations to share part of their national LPIS information with EU bodies, academia and research institutions;
• achieve a higher level of system interoperability and (meta-)data standardisation, allowing innovative ways to use and combine agri-environment-climate data;
• achieve user acceptance validation addressing privacy, security, vulnerability, liability, identification of user needs.

In the long term this pilot will contribute to a more inclusive, efficient and sustainable EU CAP.

Cross-cutting Priorities

Socio-economic science and humanities