The University of Applied Sciences Eberswalde (UASE) and the Centre for Agricultural Landscape and Land Use Research Müncheberg (ZALF) under the auspice of the Department of Agricultural Land Use of the UASE are in charge for the development of Agri-Environmental Indicators for the agricultural practice focussing on agricultural activities on arable land within the PAIS-Project.

The task was an inventory of already used indicators for agricultural practice at individual Member State level (including regional or local examples). The first working step was dedicated to select and value those agricultural practices, which are characteristic on the regional level of Member States. The second priority concerned the question which of those farming practices belong to environmentally friendly production methods.

Information to the topic were generated in different ways. Literature sources (Agrarian Reports, Statistical Surveys, Leaflets, Pilot Projects, Agri-Environmental Programmes) and internet search gave a first overview. Another effort was the development of a questionnaire concerning agricultural practices on arable land.

The questionnaire contained two different parts. The first part (A) was dedicated to be responded from the ministries on the national level or federal state level. Therefore, these questions were kept more general in the hope of receiving information on the meta level. The second part of the questionnaire (B) was going into detail, asking for the specific agricultural practice of the main crops on arable land. National agricultural authorities on Nuts 2/3 level had been involved in this working step, proposed by the appropriate ministry.

They have been asked to indicate the significance of the indicators from their point of view and if necessary to suggest alternative indicators. Furthermore information about data availability were requested concerning different NUTS levels. Another aspect concerned general possibilities to perform reliable expert assessments providing appropriate data, if there is a lack of statistical data concerning the indicators.

The feedback of the questionnaire was different, because countries answered very engaged, some few countries gave no response. One main problem to be seen was a lack of working capacity to answer. Finally after several calls for support all EU-Member States did react and 9 countries answered part B (in Germany also some of the Federal States).To analyse the results of the questionnaire as well as certain examples from literature and internet search all indicators have been edited in an Access data base.

The following classification scheme for indicators was used:

(i) Indicator category: Describes 5 main agricultural land use types (arable land, permanent grassland, permanent crops, agriculture in general and livestock).

(ii) Thematic group: Describes 18 main agricultural activities (crop, fertilization, harvest, irrigation, tillage,......)

(iii) Item: Defines 40 details as a sub-category of the farmer's main activities on arable land (crop rotation, land cover, amount of nutrient application, time of harvest, derived products, etc.).

These various criteria cover thematic details concerning agricultural practice and assist the systematic assessment. They build up the main structure of the data base and reflect the proposals of the EU member states which proposed some of the criteria.

Basic information source for above mentioned indicators were 21 Indicator projects, covering 15 different countries. Meanwhile the data base contains 865 indicators concerning agricultural practice. Indicators were listed several times, as in case of organic farming, when several different countries proposed this indicator. This was necessary to be able to differentiate the individual priority and ranking as proposed by the countries.

A first selection of 23 proposed indicators was made according to the priority of the indicators given by countries, asked in the questionnaire and through expert assessment. 8 indicators are belonging to the group of the so called Contextual Indicators which give basic information about land use in EU-Member States. These indicators are completely provided by EUROSTAT statistics on the NUTS 3 level. Above that 5 of these indicators are parallel enumerated in the list of Landscape Indicators. This decreases the real number of AEI proposed for a first set of indicators for agricultural practice to 15. But it is expected that the further evaluation of expert opinions and of questionnaire responses will extend this first indicator proposal. Above that it has to be stressed that it was not part of PAIS project to work about fertilizers and pesticides because these topics are well covered by other EU working groups. Anyway the method of grouping and ranking of indicators as proposed by EU-Member States and their experts and the following processing of information in the data base offers an objective evaluation of the significance of indicators on the European level.

A second phase of PAIS during 2003 and 2004 is focussing on the discussion with the EU member countries about the PAIS results and a testing procedure dealing with some concrete indicators. As far as possible data about some AEI will be sampled and documented on the regional and EU level to evaluate a monitoring procedure for environmental reports on the international level.

Gerd Eiden (Landsis g.e.i.e. - Luxembourg), John Bryden (Arkleton Center for Rural Development Research – Aberdeen, UK)

EUROSTAT, DG VI Agriculture

agri-environmental indicators, agricultural practice, farming practises, environmentally friendly agricultural production, agri-environmental programmes, monitoring systems