The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) started in Europe around fifty years ago, mainly for market and export aid measures. Currently, 54 Billion euros (40 of annual direct subsidies and 14 for Rural Development) are distributed to around 8 million European farmers, being one of the biggest economic sectors in the EU, while significant part of the farmers’ existence depends on these subsidies, considering that rural areas cover 90% of EU territory, which is farmed for around 50%.
Basically, the CAP is a set of legislation, procedures and tools trying to ensure self-sufficiency of food supply to more than 500 million Europeans as well as sustainability and development of rural areas.
The SEN4CAP project aims at providing to the European and national stakeholders of the CAP validated algorithms, products, workflows and best practices for agriculture monitoring relevant for the management of the CAP. Special attention shall be given to provide evidence how Sentinel derived information can support the modernization and simplification of the CAP in the post 2020 timeframe.
Initial evidence will be already required in early 2018 to support informing the policy and guidelines development of the future CAP.
The SEN4CAP main objectives are:
- to identify and specify EO products and services suitable to increase the efficiency, traceability as well as reducing the costs of the IACS;
- to develop Algorithm Theoretical Basis Documents (ATBD) along with open source code for agricultural EO products based on Sentinel-1 & Sentinel-2 responding to the user requirements;
- to demonstrate and validate the developed agricultural EO products up to national scale;
- to provide evidence for the utility of Sentinel products within IACS procedures at EU and national level for a range of national and regional Paying Agencies representative for the heterogeneous agricultural practices, landscape and climate within the EU, as well as to identify the associated limits and conditions of applications;
- to prepare and facilitate the transfer of developed EO products and services to the national PAsincluding capacity building and demonstrating cloud computing capabilities.
CS GROUP – ROMANIA is responsible for the design and the development of the SEN4CAP software system.