Launched in 1962, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) supports European agricultural productivity, rural economies, and the environment. In order to receive CAP funding, farmers must complete complex administrative procedures to show that they comply with environmental rules and legislative standards. Public administrations also need to check their compliance.
The EU-funded RECAP (peRsonalised public sErvices in support of the implementation of the CAP) project is developing a platform to cut inspection costs and help farmers to understand CAP regulations and receive early warning of potential breaches. It gathers information from open satellite data, farmers’ mobile devices, and satellite data providers’ commercial channels.
The RECAP platform is aimed at paying agencies (the government bodies that distribute CAP funds), agricultural consultants, and farmers themselves. It extracts useful features from Earth Observation open data, correlates them with user-generated and geo-information data available to public organisations (including geo-referenced and time-stamped photos sent by farmers). It then models this information so that potential breaches of compliance can be identified by public authorities and inspectors. A tablet application with checklists enables inspectors to carry out quick, efficient and objective inspections.
In addition, farmers have access to a mobile application that makes it easier to comply with regulations imposed by the CAP. This provides personalised information for simplifying the interpretation of complex regulations and early alerts of potential breaches. The RECAP consortium brings together universities, consultancies, and government bodies. The platform has been tested in Greece, Lithuania, Serbia, Spain and the UK with the participation of public authorities, farmers, and agricultural consultants.
RECAP in brief
- Total Budget: EUR 2 669 940 (EU contribution: EUR 2 142 381.75)
- Duration: 05/2016-10/2018
- Countries involved: Greece (coordinator), Belgium, Lithuania, Serbia, Spain, United Kingdom.
Key figures in the European Union
- There are around 11 million farms in the EU and 22 million people work regularly in the agricultural sector.
- Around 40% of the total land area of the EU is used for agriculture.
- The EU supports farmers with 38% of its budget, but this funding constitutes only 1% of all public expenditure in the EU.
eGovernment
The European Commission’s eGovernment Action Plan for 2016-2020 aims to ensure that public administrations and public institutions in the EU are open, efficient and inclusive and provide borderless, personalised, secure, user-friendly, end-to-end digital public services to all citizens and businesses by 2020. Borderless, digital public services will make it easier to travel and work across borders, provide information that is accessible to everyone, meet data protection and privacy standards, and reduce the number of contact points and requests for information.
To fund this, the European Commission’s proposed new Digital Europe Programme allocates EUR 1.3 billion of funding to broaden the use of digital technologies across the EU, including the digitisation of public administrations and services.