AGEA awarded at the XXIV European MARS conference in Dubrovnik

Yesterday, the Agency for agricultural disbursements was awarded by the Joint Research Center - JRC to the European MARS Technical Conference being held in Dubrovnik for being the first European agency to activate the innovative process monitoring of CAP questions through the use of Copernicus satellite images.

The MARS Conference is organized annually by the JRC in collaboration with the Directorate General for Agriculture (DG AGRI) of the European Commission and is an important moment for presenting and discussing the experiences of the Member States regarding the Integrated Management and Control System (Integrated Administration and Control System) IACS).

The central theme of this year's conference was monitoring, introduced by a recent community regulation that provides for the progressive replacement of the current sample checks of agricultural areas (preparatory to the payment of community premiums) carried out through photo interpretation and field visits with automatic procedures based on satellite image processing of the Copernicus Program.

In particular, the Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 satellites guarantee, in an open and free mode, the availability of images of the entire territory with an approximately weekly frequency. This makes it possible to examine all the premium applications throughout the entire administrative process that goes from the presentation of the application to the payment of the Community premium.

The new monitoring approach substantially modifies the current scenario, based on post-application checks - with possible application of payment reductions and sanctions - replacing it with a timely communication process to the farmer in the event of non-conformities detected during the course of the demand monitoring process. This allows the farmer to correct his application, thus avoiding penalties in the payment of the premium.

From the technological point of view, this is an extremely innovative topic, currently the subject of intense research and experimentation activities throughout Europe by qualified public and private entities (JRC, ESA, payment agencies, etc.) to give concrete application, in the agricultural field, to the enormous potential offered by the Copernicus Program satellites.

The recognition obtained by Agea is the result of an intense collaboration with the Research Center and with DG AGRI, which has made it possible already in 2018 to apply monitoring on about 35.000 companies that have submitted the PAC application for the single payment in the province of Foggia.

AGEA awarded at the XXIV European MARS conference in Dubrovnik

| Economics |