Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 24 January 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Special Reports on EU Support for Young Farmers and the Rural Affairs Programme: European Court of Auditors

12:10 pm

Mr. Janusz Wojciechowski:

As I said previously, the progress of absorption is only 21%. It is too early to evaluate the functioning of the young farmers scheme. In the previous system it was only pillar two, now it is pillar one. The examples I presented from Italy and Poland show that this form of support probably will not be effective for generational renewal, but we do not have the full evaluation of the new system. It is a political decision which system will exist in the future. The problem is that this is the consequence of programming proceeding too late. Now we have full knowledge about the functioning of the system in 2007 to 2013, but we do not have an evaluation of the new system yet. We start debate about the system after 2020. This is the big problem. The new policy and new instrument should be based on the evaluation of the previous period but we do not have enough data to evaluate it.