In accordance with Article 69(4) of Regulation (EC) No 1698/2005 the annual breakdown by Member State of the amounts for Community support to rural development is to be made after deduction of the resources devoted to technical assistance for the Commission and taking into account the amounts reserved for regions eligible under the Convergence Objective, past performance and particular situations and needs based on objective criteria.

Supports the proposal that a large number of local, regional, national and EU support schemes should undergo a “mapping exercise”; believes that this exercise should include private-sector and local initiatives to help SME access funding, in particular initiatives facilitating access to loans for micro-enterprises, as well an assessment of the effectiveness of existing EU support schemes; believes that the mapping should be conducted in regular intervals and serve as basis for a benchmark and scoreboard system; believes that the initial mapping exercise should serve as a basis for the assessment of the effectiveness of existing EU sup ...[+++]port schemes; notes that any mapping exercise may not capture all initiatives, in particular if they are small or informal and if the cost and/or practicality of doing so is not viable;

Furthermore, with a view to covering the specific needs of their agricultural sectors and to ensure that the support received in the past by farmers is not drastically reduced, Member States should be allowed under certain limits to use the funds to be integrated into the single payment scheme to support farmers who exercised certain agricultural activities in other sectors during the same years, such as using grassland or keeping animals.

With the time elapsing since the introduction of the single payment scheme and following the successive integration of further sectors into that scheme, it is becoming increasingly hard to justify the legitimacy of significant individual differences in the support level which are based only on past support.

2. The expenditure of the Authority shall include the staff, administrative, infrastructure and operational expenses, and expenses resulting from contracts entered into with third parties or resulting from the financial support referred to in Article 36.

-New types of intervention and new mechanisms should be developed with a view to increasing flexibility and speed of implementation while retaining "the best of the past" (principle of collaborative research; peer review; support for other EU policies).