Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy O'Sullivan for raising this issue.

It is proposed, as part of Ireland’s draft CAP strategic plan which is currently with the European Commission for approval, that there will be two approaches within the new agri-environment scheme. As I outlined earlier, there will be standard or general agri-environment climate measures, AECM, involving a range of actions that individual farmers may undertake and a co-operative project approach, whereby farmers in defined high priority geographical areas will be able to work together. Under the latter approach, successful applicants will undertake bespoke farm, landscape and catchment measures and may also be able to select from the AECM general suite of actions. Farmers participating in this approach will have the assistance of a local co-operation project team which will assist with implementation of the scheme at local level and work with farmers to ensure the landscape and co-operative measures are undertaken in a way that contributes significantly to our environmental objectives.

The proposed new AECM will contain both results-based elements as well as prescription-based actions which are similar to the green low-carbon agri-environment scheme, GLAS. The inclusion of results-based actions will assist in ensuring that farmers will be paid for the results they achieve. For the results-based actions, the environmental health or condition of the habitat is scored using a range of indicators to assess biodiversity, climate, water quality and soil aspects to estimate the environmental services provided. The higher the environmental health of a field, the higher its score and consequently the more the farmer will be rewarded for his or her time, effort and management of it.

The AECM general approach has been designed to enable all participating farm types to improve their biodiversity levels by ensuring the provision of winter food, nesting and chick rearing habitat for farmland birds, and resources for pollinators through a range of proposed actions.

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