Auditors discover blunder by Commission 12 years on
Instead, it was defined by the European Commission, more than a decade ago, as anyone who could show that a quarter of their total income was derived from agriculture. As a result, it didn’t matter if they had farmed the land intended for planting for half a century, if their off-farm income was more than three times the income from the land, they were not entitled to the generous “farmer” premia on offer to encourage plantation. They qualified for a lower rate of premia, over a period five years shorter than the “farmer” premia term.
Now, the EU Court of Auditors are unhappy with how the EU forestry scheme operates in Ireland. They point out that premia are paid to compensate for income loss, when growing trees on land which was previously used for farming. EU Court officials were unhappy when they randomly selected some Irish plantations for closer scrutiny and found that none of the selected premia beneficiaries had farmed the land before it was planted.
It has taken the EU over 12 years to discover the illogical basis for their decision.
So it has taken EU officials more than 12 years to discover the strangely illogical decision made by other EU officials, to use on income criteria rather than insist on prior use of the land for farming.
This “discovery” by Court of Auditors officials in Ireland will now more than likely be used in the approaching reform of the forestry scheme, to push ahead with changes to reduced premia payments over a shorter period.
Why in the first place did the EU not set out a requirement that the land should have been farmed by the applicant for at least the previous five years, in order to qualify for premia?
It would have made perfect sense, would have been easy to determine, would ensure that the forestry premia compensated for the loss of taking land out of mainstream agriculture, and guaranteed that when the Court of Auditors arrived to have a look, they would be returning very happy that everything was as they’d expected.
