Implementation and control of the Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions within the CwRS programme in Hungary.

The presentation and the paper provide a technical overview of checking the Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAEC) issues in Hungary in 2004, emphasizing the standards that were controlled with remote sensing and GIS techniques. Area-based subsidies constitute an important part of the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU (CAP). For decreasing the amount of unjustified payments, claims for area-based subsidies undergo several strict and detailed checks. Remote sensing is a legally established, efficient, objective, widely applied method for the area based subsidy control. Based on the Commission Regulation 2199/2003, in the Member States applying the Single Area Payment Scheme (SAPS) the Control of Area-based Subsidies shall include the checking of Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAEC) for a certain sample of the claims. Some issues of GAEC can be controlled with remote sensing, while others require classical on-the-spot control or can be managed by administrative method. In Hungary, the Institute of Geodesy, Cartography and Remote Sensing (FOMI) carries out the remote sensing control of the area-based subsidies. In 2004, about 4% of the dossiers were controlled with remote sensing. Within this activity, three standards of GAEC were also controlled for all the selected dossiers. Two of the standards belong to the issue “Minimum level of maintenance”, these were controlled in the frame of CAPI (Computer-Aided Photo-Interpretation). For the third one, belonging to “Soil erosion”, noninteractive GIS techniques were used. A slope category map, derived from DEM (Digital Elevation Model), was matched against the results of CAPI. Within the control sample, approximately 2% of the agricultural parcels failed to meet some of the GAEC standards. Based on the results, it is clear that during the organization of future subsidy control campaigns, the potentials of the remote sensing and GIS techniques should be further taken into account and exploited.