Monitoring and Evaluation Frameworks for the Common Agricultural Policy

Agricultural policies are widening the scope to contribute to environmental objectives, the Paris climate agreement and the SDG’s. Furthermore, Member States develop their national strategic plans with more attention to the regional implementation of the CAP. Broadening of scope will increase the amount of indicators for monitoring and evaluation. In the current situation, agricultural statistics (among others FSS and FADN) and administrative data (i.e. IACS) are used for monitoring and evaluation. To address the broadening set of needs, it becomes essential to make use of the possibilities of satellite data and sensor data and the increased amount of information flows within the agricultural sector. Despite these new opportunities, it will not be possible to provide all data needs with these new technologies, so there will still be a role for agricultural statistics and farmers’ willingness to give access to data owned by the farmer.MEF4CAP will make an inventory of future data needs, describe the current developments in ICT and data capturing techniques and assess the technological readiness of these solutions. MEF4CAP will make intensive use of workshops and stakeholder interaction to identify best practices, ensure the inclusion of all relevant developments and to discuss the potential of widening their application. MEF4CAP will deliver a roadmap for future monitoring, where the needs of different stakeholders are met and the potential of different approaches is fully exploited, while minimizing the costs and administrative burden and optimizing the value of the collected data.MEF4CAP will strongly benefit from the broad composition of the project team. MEF4CAP will bring together experts on the current agricultural statistics, current administrative systems, evaluations for policy making and on farm advisory as well as experts on remote sensing, sensor data, ICT developments and developments of information flows in the agricultural sector.