Intergroup on a Policy for the Countryside

Rural Areas Policy Strategy Group

Since then, the policy has evolved taking on board additional public concerns such as production quality, the environment, animal welfare and a living countryside, which accounts for 80% of European territory.

In recognition of this link, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and rural development provide instruments and measures to encourage GI and to enhance areas with a high nature value in the countryside. This applies to large-scale direct support for farmers in the CAP’s first pillar, preventing land abandonment and fragmentation, and to smaller-scale measures supported through rural development programmes in the second pillar, including non-productive investments, agro-environmental measures (e.g. farmed landscape conservation measure ...[+++]s, maintaining and enhancing hedgerows, buffer strips, terraces, dry walls, sylvo-pastoral measures etc.), payments fostering the coherence of Natura 2000, cooperation on maintaining valuable field boundaries, and conserving and restoring rural heritage features.

For the first time, the foundations have been laid for a comprehensive and consistent rural development policy whose task will be to supplement market management by ensuring that agricultural expenditure is devoted more than in the past to spatial development and nature conservancy, the establishment of young farmers, etc. The Member States will be able to vary, i.e. downwards, the direct aids awarded to holdings in line with criteria to be defined by each Member State relating to the amount of labour employed on a farm.

However, analysis of the progress made in the light of the 4 common objectives reveals that: (a) the measures concerned with promoting access to the labour market have, in tandem with the NAP/empl, achieved considerable success; (b) pursuit of the reform of the social protection system has not affected attainment of the goals inherent in the Minimum Guaranteed Income scheme (scheme combining financial benefits with a socio-occupational integration plan); (c) the aim of having all persons in a situation of exclusion sign a "social integration contract" within one year was too ambitious and was difficult both to implement and to evaluate, since it requires multise ...[+++]ctoral involvement and since the universe of individuals to be covered remains undefined (the same comment applies to the individualised follow-up of children and young persons within three months); (d) the setting up of a national social welfare helpline has made it easier for certain priority groups to obtain information and a rapid response to their problems; (e) the "Urban Social Development Contracts" and the "Rural Areas and Social Development" project, which were aimed at tackling the problems of the regional nature of exclusion, were abandoned for budgetary and policy reasons; (f) as regards mobilising stakeholders in the process, the Interministerial Monitoring Committee, set up expressly to monitor the NAPincl, operated only intermittently and its composition had to be altered following the change of government, hence its impact as an institutional co-ordination forum has been established only gradually; as regards civil society, the vague reference to the Co-operation and Social Solidarity Pact and the project for the creation of an NGOs Forum illustrates the low degree of involvement of these players.