Today, May 8th, the EU ambassadors confirmed an agreement reached on April 11st, 2018 between the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council and the representatives of the European Parliament on the modernization and improvement of the European framework for the compilation of integrated agricultural statistics.

"Solid and comparable data are the basis for the formulation of evidence-based policies, with these improved rules we will have better farm-level statistics for the implementation and monitoring of the Common Agricultural Policy, without the additional burden of data collection ", said Rumen Porodzanov, Minister of Agriculture, Food and Forestry of the Republic of Bulgaria and President of the Council.

The new standards address the deficiencies identified in the evaluation of the European System of Agricultural Statistics (EASS) by streamlining and updating the collection of farm-level statistics in a single framework, and by allowing greater flexibility for the rapid introduction of new collections of data.

Now that the agreement has been confirmed by the EU ambassadors on behalf of the Council, the regulation will be submitted to the European Parliament for a vote at first reading, and subsequently to the Council for approval.