Austrian program for environmentally friendly agriculture

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The Austrian Program for Environmentally Sound Agriculture  ( ÖPUL ) is a broad-based agricultural policy funding measure for environmental policy and landscape planning in Austria . The program has been running since 1995.

Basics

ÖPUL is one of the central spatial planning measures for the development of rural areas at federal level . In doing so, use is made of EU funding for regional development, particularly the European Regional Development Fund  (ERDF). In Burgenland , one of the structurally weaker regions of Austria, the regulation is such that 75% of the funding is contributed by the EU, 15% by the Republic of Austria (i.e. by the federal government) and 10% by the Province of Burgenland. The EU share is lower in the structurally strong regions.

The idea behind the program is to provide financial support not to the landowners, but to the managers of agriculturally used areas (mostly farmers) if they help to protect nature and the environment through their economic practices . So there are z. B. Funding for the renouncement of yield-increasing resources (groundwater protection), the mowing of steep areas or alpine pastures (avalanche protection), for the preservation of rare breeds of livestock and cultivated plants, for leaving near-natural field strips (as biotopes).

In 2000, for example, around 152,000 farms took part in the agri-environmental programs (at the time ÖPUL 95 or ÖPUL 98), that was three quarters of all farms, 85% of the agricultural area was included in ÖPUL measures.

Criticism from the EU Commission in August 2014

The 1.1 billion dollar program for rural development was criticized by the European Commission in mid-2014. She criticized, among other things, that the ministry under Rupprecht did not provide the EU with enough information on the strategic environmental assessment - this means that the co-financing of rural development projects by the EU Agricultural Fund (EAFRD) could not be promised. The criticism also went into great detail on the individual planned subsidies and the formulation of the subsidy requirements. The fundamental criticism appears serious. A statement on the previous environmental commitment in regional and agricultural policy reads: “The Austrian program for rural development is one of the rural development programs with the highest expenditure on environmental and climate policy priorities,” but also “it is difficult to do Understand why continuous high financial support for the environmental sector (as has been practiced for several programming periods) and high utilization by farmers does not lead to any concrete improvement in environmental quality. The question arises whether the design of the measures is appropriate to the level of requirement and whether the measures are efficient enough. "For example, the agri-environmental indicator High Nature Value Farmland  (HNV, agricultural land with a high natural value), which is around 25% of the agricultural area, from 2007 to 2013 decreased by a good 70,000 ha, more than the total agricultural area. According to press reports, the EU suspected that subsidies would be distributed under the heading of environmental protection that are hardly environmentally relevant. At the same time, the statistics on the extent were also questioned: Austria, for example, reported 353,100 hectares as organically farmed in 2010 and a further 48,010 hectares as areas in the process of being converted from conventional to ecological. A Swot analysis that examines Austria's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, however, showed 533,230 hectares of organic land for 2012. Afterwards Austria would downplay the success of the program in order to distribute further subsidies.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Spatial planning report of the Austrian Spatial Planning Conference . Series 160, short version, 3.5 Specific measures for the development of rural areas , p. 8 f ( pdf , oerok.gv.at).
  2. a b c EU tears apart Austria's environmental program , DER STANDARD, Conrad Seidl, August 12, 2014
  3. Agri-environmental indicator "High Nature Value Farmland" Federal Environment Agency (accessed March 2, 2017); and Federal Environment Agency: “High Nature Value Farmland” for Austria. 2015 report on behalf of the BMLFUW to evaluate the rural development program