Escalas para evaluar el pronóstico endovascular de las MAVs

In today’s policy context, agriculture is expected to produce abundant and affordable food, while at the same time taking into account the environment, maintaining rural landscapes, and protecting the welfare of animals and the health of consumers. In Europe, the Common Agricultural Policy has been reformed to address these issues, with promises to promote a fairer distribution of agricultural funds among farmers, and most importantly to make the CAP more environmentally friendly.

Although some environmental issues arising from agriculture are addressed in EU reg- ulation, tying CAP subsidies to environmental and rural development objectives offers the most promising opportunity to accelerate a transition toward more sustainable and resource- efficient farming systems. Driven by the multifunctionality paradigm, past CAP reforms have seen the environment and rural development become permanent issues of debate, pushing for further integration of environmental and socioeconomic standards into CAP supporting schemes.

major instruments: cross-compliance, greening measures, and Agri-environment Schemes (AES). While cross-compliance and greening measures have the advantage of being applied to all farmers accessing subsidies across the whole EU, AESs continue to be implemented on a voluntary basis, with wide variation on how Member States design and adjust these schemes to address local priorities and conditions.

Despite several attempts to shift CAP subsidies from the initial trade-distorting price support schemes to be provided in the form of decoupled direct payments, past reforms have not resulted in overall reduction of EU expenditure on agricultural policy. In the contrary, the CAP continues to receive the largest share (40 percent) of the EU budget, and to follow similar patterns of distribution within pillars. As always, European farmers remain heavily dependent on CAP support systems as a source of income, with direct payments maintain- ing the lion’s share of the CAP budget. Consequently, farmers have made a tremendous effort to maintain the CAP supporting systems in place and to ensure a large portion of its budget continues to fund direct payments with minimum environmental standards at- tached. Environmental organizations, on the other hand, have worked intensively to ensure that subsidies are shifted from payment entitlements toward sustaining more targeted agri- environment payments for public goods, which should be implemented in a transparent and accountable way.

My research findings point to an apparent failure of the EU in pursuing further greening of the CAP. I find that environmental and socioeconomic objectives only have been par- tially integrated into the CAP supporting schemes, either because of the limited scope of the objectives or the unsuccessful implementation of standards. Several standards remain

to be added to the list of CAP environmental and socioeconomic standards. In addition, implementation of cross-compliance, greening measures, and agri-environment schemes have been tailored in various ways to adapt to Member States’ priorities and conditions, often in detriment of EU sustainability goals. The large majority of the CAP budget continues to favor direct payments with minimum environmental and socioeconomic requirements. At the same time, entry-level, poorly designed and under-financed AESs fail to deliver the expected environmental outcomes beyond those set under cross-compliance. This serves as evidence that CAP payments have only been partially explored as a way to promote environmental and rural development objectives, and to foster agricultural multifunctionality.

If subsidies are supposed to truly compensate the non-commodity outputs of agriculture, CAP supporting schemes will have to shift toward broader implementation of outcome-based payments. There is opportunity to learn from pilot outcome-based programs implemented in some Member States (e.g. Germany), which can and should influence the adoption of similar systems in other Member States. Also, experiences and lessons learned in the design and implementation of outcome-based standards in the biofuels sector can inform initiatives emerging from other agricultural sectors in the EU. A successful operationalization of such outcome-based payments, however, requires efforts to develop the appropriate institutional and analytical capacity to measure, monitor, and evaluate results, as well as to check if outcomes match targeted sustainability aspirations. Investments in long-term research to develop and test quantitative measurement tools also will be key to allow the establishment of causal links between outcomes and particular practices across space and over time.

Member States. This requires further developing and applying operational agri-environment indicators to assess trends, improving data collection and availability to support measure- ments, and further developing mapping capabilities to facilitate monitoring. Besides facil- itating the verification of compliance, these instruments can inform adaptive management, and help Member States and the EU to set priorities for the design of future policies to ensure continuous improvement. Lastly, strengthening the national Farm Advisory Systems (FAS) is crucial to ensure that farmers are receiving the appropriate assistance and training to understand and implement standards. Moreover, farmer’s participation in the design and implementation of measures and indicators should be encouraged in order to ensure that they are acceptable and identifiable to farmers.

Up to this date, EU and Member States’ policy efforts to address complex ecosystem challenges emerging from the unsustainable use of natural resources have remained to a con- siderable degree fragmented. This reality has made it even more challenging for Europe to revert current levels of environmental degradation across farm fences and Member States’ boundaries. There is a need for a fundamental re-think on the way agricultural policies are designed and implemented to address sustainability issues as wide as climate change, water pollution, biodiversity, and soils. To fully understand and deliver the potentials of multi- functionality, fragmented policies and funding mechanisms will have to be better integrated.