The Ministry of Agricultural Policies announces that by the deadline for submitting applications relating to the Common Agricultural Policy set at 15 June 2018, the objective set by the EU law has been achieved, which provides for the submission of 100% of CAP 2018 applications. in graphic format, thus abandoning the previous alphanumeric mode.
This is a very important result, which rewards important investments in technologies put in place and which are the necessary conditions to simplify the complex system of incentives to the sector, make controls more effective and reduce financial penalizations for farmers and State.
To achieve this, based on the experience of previous campaigns, data acquisition processes have been optimized and important simplifications have been adopted for most of the problems encountered in previous years that have slowed down the presentation of applications. Moreover, to anticipate the times as much as possible, Agea started the activities for the presentation of the Single Application for the 2018 Campaign, already the 15 November 2018 exclusively in graphic mode, well in advance of the previous campaign.
At the expiration of the 15 June, deadline for the submission of the single application without incurring penalties, 552 thousand company files 2018 and 518 thousand thousand unique questions in graphic mode (408 thousand Ordinary questions and 110 thousand questions of small farmers) are collected in the system . The data of the other paying agencies (overall 213.354 applications) are in line with the results of Agea.
Also for the questions related to rural development measures, Agea has made available to the CAA an application for the presentation of the application in graphic mode. The application has been progressively integrated with tools to support the pre-registration of documents, giving the procedure an efficiency and fluidity that allowed the presentation of about 160 thousand applications in graphic mode. Similarly for the other Paying Bodies, 70.058 applications were submitted, largely exceeding the minimum regulatory threshold set by the European Commission at 25%. Therefore, the graphic compilation mode represented a real simplification in the presentation of the questions.
The graphic solution developed in Agea has also been used in a virtuous way by other Regional Paying Bodies, such as APPAG of the Autonomous Province of Trento, ARPEA of the Piedmont Region, OPLO of the Lombardy Region and AGREA of the Emilia Romagna Region which, by means of a memorandum of understanding, have required to reuse the Agea software and graphically computerized the 100% of the company files used for the single application.
In order to achieve this important result, the work of all the Agricultural Assistance Centers was central, which, extensively present throughout the country, have implemented a uniform, continuous and collaborative dialogue with farmers.