EUROPEAN COMMISSION Brussels, 5.2.2019 COM(2019) 50 final REPORT FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND THE COUNCIL on the functioning of Regulation (EU) No 1337/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 December 2011 concerning European statistics on permanent crops



REPORT FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND THE COUNCIL on the functioning of Regulation (EU) No 1337/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 December 2011 concerning European statistics on permanent crops 1. BACKGROUND Regulation (EU) No 1337/2011 (‘the Regulation’) concerning European statistics on permanent crops entered into force on 1 January 2012. It repealed two legal acts: Council Regulation (EEC) No 357/79 of 5 February 1979 on ‘statistical surveys of areas under vines’ and Directive 2001/109/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 December 2001 ‘concerning the statistical surveys to be carried out by the Member States in order to determine the production potential of plantations of certain species of fruit trees’. Regulation (EU) No 1337/2011 covers two structural data collections on permanent crops: ·orchard data collection on apple, pear, peach, nectarine, orange, lemon, small citrus fruit and olive trees and vines for table grapes; and ·vineyard data collection on vineyards producing grapes for wine, raisins and dual purpose grapes. So far, there have been three data collections organised: two on orchards (2012 and 2017) and one on vineyards (2015). Article 13 of the Regulation stipulates that ‘by 31 December 2018 and every 5 years thereafter, the Commission shall review the functioning of this Regulation. In the context of this review, the Commission shall assess whether it is necessary to produce all the data referred to in Article 4. Where the Commission considers that some of those data are not any longer required, it shall be empowered to adopt delegated acts in accordance with Article 11 that delete certain data from Annexes I and II’. This report summarises the main findings of the review on the Regulation’s functioning. It refers to the European agricultural statistics strategy 2020 endorsed by the European Statistical System Committee in its 27th meeting on 19 November 2015, and presents the new legal framework for structural statistics on permanent crops repealing Regulation (EU) No 1337/2011, the functioning of which is the subject of this report. 2. MAIN FINDINGS AND ASSESSMENT Regulation (EU) No 1337/2011 is to some extent problematic to implement, as indicated by the experiences from the 2012 and 2017 orchard data collections and the 2015 vineyard data collection, the feedback from various expert group meetings and the quality reports provided by the Member States. The user needs have also changed over the past decade. 2.1 Issues linked to the data collection Based on the analysis of the data and quality reports it is clear that the orchard data collection and vineyard data collection have some in-built challenges. 2.1.1 Orchard data collection There are two consequences from having the data variables (species group, colour of fruit, time of harvest, age, density) cross-tabled against each other. Firstly, the Member States have to use very high sampling rates. Among those countries which did not have an orchard register, the average sampling rate was very high — 54 %. Therefore, five of these countries had to organise a census to collect data on orchards. Secondly, the detailed breakdown of the data leads to costly and time consuming data collections. The average cost of the orchard data collection (per reference year) is approximately EUR 220 000 per country, ranging from EUR 2 500 to EUR 900 000. The labour input in statistical authorities ranges from 0.1 full time equivalent (FTE) to 6.2 FTE. There is also a very heavy burden on respondents due to very large samples and long questionnaires requiring a lot of area measurements.

The large investment made at national level for collecting very detailed information unfortunately does not bring the full benefit to the data users as some of the collected data cannot be released due to statistical confidentiality. The species groups defined in Annex I of the Regulation, in particular for apples and pears, do not well reflect the distribution of species groups in the EU. For dessert apples, 34 % of the tree area is classified in the group ‘Others’ and for pears 18 %. The problem is even bigger in the northern and eastern parts of Europe, where in some countries almost all orchards belong to the class ‘Other’. It is difficult to collect voluntary data on apple, pear and peach trees that are planted for industrial processing as in many cases the weather, market conditions and quality aspects guide the yearly decisions of farmers on whether they sell the fruits for consumption or for industrial processing more than the fruit tree variety. 2.1.2 Vineyard data collection Article 3 (4) of the Regulation stipulates that data on vines other than table grapes (Annex II of the Regulation) ‘shall be provided using the data available in the vineyard register implemented in accordance with Article 185a of Regulation (EC) No 1234/2007 for all the holdings included in this register, as defined in point (a) of Article 3(1) of Regulation (EC) No 436/2009’. The obligatory link between the vineyard register and the vineyard data collection under the Regulation poses problems in several Member States as the register is not always up to date and it does not contain all the variables listed in the Regulation. The obligation to use the register as the sole data source is also problematic from the perspective of the European Statistics Code of practice. This is because Article 6.2 states that the choice of statistical sources should be based on statistical considerations, and Article 12.1 requires that the source data are regularly assessed and validated. 2.2. User needs The consultation with the policy DGs confirmed that the Commission needs to be kept accurately informed about the potential of plantations to produce certain species of permanent crops within the EU. To ensure that the common agricultural policy is properly administered, the Commission requires data on permanent crops to be regularly provided. However, the screening of data showed that significant measures can be carried out to reduce burden, particularly for collecting data on orchards.

The following variables are no longer needed as part of the structural statistical data that are provided for the policy monitoring needs: •species groups for apples and pears; •colour of fruit for peaches, nectarines and table grapes; and •the time of harvest for peaches, nectarines, apricots, oranges and small citrus fruits. In addition, there is no longer a need to cross-tabulate the variables used for age and density, although they can be collected separately. The regularity of the data collection can be 6-7 years as the structure of orchards and vineyards is relatively stable. Under the Regulation the Member States cultivating the vines on at least 500 ha had to implement the data collection. For the orchards the threshold was 1000 ha at national level for any single type of fruit tree. To align the threshold to the other measures and registers in the wine sector, it should also be 1000 ha for wine vineyards. The policy needs data that better represents regional areas. Under the Regulation the data on fruit trees were collected at NUTS 1 level and the data on vineyards for wine production at NUTS 2 level. As these data are important for analysing the regional potential of orchards and vineyards both in the context of market management and in the case of a crisis, all structural data on orchards and vineyard are needed at NUTS2 level. 3. EUROPEAN AGRICULTURAL STATISTICS STRATEGY 2020 AND THE NEW GENERATION OF AGRICULTURAL STATISTICS: IMPLICATIONS FOR REGULATION (EU) No 1337/2011 Eurostat has worked intensively on the ‘Strategy for Agricultural Statistics towards 2020 and beyond’ with the data users (mostly other Commission departments and EU institutions) and the national statistical institutes since 2014. The agricultural statistics strategy aims to ·efficiently produce statistics, which meet the users’ needs; ·not significantly increase the burden on respondents and on statistical systems, and make more statistics available; ·improve the consistency between the agricultural statistics sub-domains;