Nitrate pollution due to agriculture, project report No.2: cross compliance of agricultural and environmental policies

Developing and using the concept of 'cross compliance' this report provides an examination of the primary and secondary effects of agri-environmental policies. Cross-compliance is applied to a number of agri-environmental policies; CAP reform, the 'accompanying measures' of CAP reform and a selection of member state agri-environmental policies. The development of the concept of cross compliance provides a useful tool to perform evaluation on the effectiveness and efficiency of general policy instruments, but specifically policy scenarios designed to reduce nitrate pollution of groundwater due to agriculture and goes some way to help answer policy questions on which mechanism may achieve a wide range of performance criteria. Cross-compliance can be applied at different levels of the policy and can be used to categorise policies into a number of sets according to specified criteria. CAP reform policies designed to control supply, although having positive environmental effects, are not as successful at achieving environmental objectives in comparison to the 'accompanying measures' elements of CAP reform. However a number of the policies from the accompanying measures package, for example the protection of rare breeds and the shelter planting, have very specific and narrow aims and so do not achieve large positive cross compliance for reductions in nitrate pollution. The analysis also deals with a number of other policies, some agricultural in basis, such as the Less Favoured Areas policy, which scored highly in achieving income redistribution to the targeted group but failed in achieving positive environmental effects. A number of useful trends have been identified and these may be useful for formulating future agri-environmental policy in terms of achieving higher degrees of cross-compliance. It is recognised that this technique would be usefully expanded and that it warrants further investigation in order that a quantitative valuation of positive and negative cross-compliance could eventually be attached to each policy.