Improving Measures for Targeting Agri-Environmental Payments: The Case of High Nature Value Farming

The debate on optimization of policies and instruments for European agriculture has lasted for several decades and there is still no consensus about it. Although there is unanimity on the targets these policies should achieve, there is an on-going discussion about policy tools for the practical implementation of the CAP as regards agri-environmental payments. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this discussion by looking at the approaches developed to evaluate environmental and economic efficiency simultaneously, as well as to examine possibilities for more targeted agricultural support by implementation of economic-environmental efficiency analysis. In this regard it is especially interesting to consider the case of support for sustainable land use practices such as in HNV (high nature value) farming and the opportunities for implementing such analyses in areas of HNV agriculture: we consider in particular disadvantaged mountain areas in the Romanian Carpathians and the bordering areas in the Ukrainian Carpathians.