Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)

Under the new single payment scheme farmers receiving direct aid are required to respect the various statutory management requirements set down in EU legislation on the environment, food safety, animal health and welfare, and plant health and to maintain the farm in good agricultural and environmental condition. There is also an obligation on the member state to ensure that there is no significant reduction in the amount of land under permanent pasture by reference to the total area under permanent pasture in 2003. These requirements are known as cross compliance.

The EU directives and regulations referred to in cross compliance have been in place for many years. Producers are familiar with them and are complying with the standards set in implementing them in Ireland. The Department prepared a consultative document on cross compliance in October 2004 and invited views from interested organisations. Department officials met the main farming organisations in December to discuss their submissions and these discussions have continued more recently during the review of the protocol on direct payments.

An information booklet on cross compliance has been issued to all farmers and it sets out the principle features of cross compliance such as the standards that must be met by farmers and the control arrangements that are necessary. To coincide with the issue of the booklet, a series of nationwide farmer information meetings took place in April and were organised by the Department in conjunction with Teagasc. These meetings focused not only on cross compliance but addressed the various other issues associated with the introduction of the single payment scheme. In implementing that scheme, I aim to minimise the number of inspection visits and to move towards a situation where eligibility and cross compliance checks will be carried out during a single farm visit. It is envisaged that the 22,000 inspections, which were carried under the old regime, will be significantly reduced to around 10,000 under the single payment scheme. This approach should minimise the level of inconvenience to farmers. However, in certain instances more than one inspection of a holding may be unavoidable.

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