Paying Agencies (PAs) from 9 EU Member States have joined forces to realise a new vision on the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) – the instrument for CAP governance – in this project called: “New IACS Vision in Action” (NIVA). This project has demonstrated collaboration in exploring innovations and working together in creating an innovation ecosystem. These Paying Agencies recognise that grasping the potential of digitisation calls on innovating their systems and approaches. Encouraged by new EU legislation on Monitoring and the plans of the commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development on the future of CAP, also including the plans in the EU Green Deal, these Paying Agencies demonstrate how these digital tools will enhance their operation and at the same time lead to new opportunities for farmers and industry to improve farming processes and techniques to contribute to sustainability and competitiveness of the agricultural sector. These innovations are also important for the future CAP which focuses on agricultural performance. At the same time, these PAs concluded that in isolation implementing and testing innovations would result in a massive duplication of effort, and hence it collaboration was crucial to implementing innovations fast.
NIVA delivers a suite of digital solutions, e-tools and good practices for e-governance and initiates an innovation ecosystem to support further development of IACS that will facilitate data and information flows, against the background of reform discussions of the CAP.
The IACS is built upon several other core systems collecting farm data, payment rights, livestock and other information which overall constitute an Agricultural Knowledge Information System (AKIS) which shall all-together contribute to a real efficient monitoring. Improvements in the processes and data validation are thus required to enable reducing the administrative burden and to improve the efficiency of the whole system. More digital inclusiveness allows re-use of (open) data and support farmers in more accurate and less burdensome claims. In many member states, digital inclusiveness might lead to a completely pre-populated application of income support, and to an even more advanced ‘Click-and-Pay’ seamless claim.
The overall objective of NIVA is thus formulated as: NIVA aims to modernise IACS by making efficient use of digital solutions and e-tools, by creating reliable methodologies and harmonised data sets for monitoring agricultural performance while reducing administrative burden for farmers, paying agencies and other stakeholders.
In setting up NIVA, Member States have identified and discussed prime use cases in digital innovation of their processes and systems, which represent common goals. Each use case involves the stakeholders required to demonstrate and evaluate these innovations. The cross-cutting digital and process innovations are further developed and made available as open source tools even beyond the consortium members. These use cases are strategically designed to cover every part of newly proposed CAP and altogether constitute a complete new IACS vision that address the new challenges. The digital innovations form the base for growing collaboration and exchange between the partners, their stakeholders (ranging from farmers to the different bureaus at the European Commission, NGOs etc.) and solution providers.
