Agricultural subsidy fraud prevented by satellite monitoring

The monitoring by means of the Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 satellites (of the Copernicus program), of the agricultural plots in our country, led to the discovery last year of 453 farmers who intended to defraud the subsidies granted from European funds to support farmers in our country, according to a response received following a request sent by BURSA Newspaper to the Agency for Payment and Interventions in Agriculture (APIA). The 453 farmers owned 623 parcels that were coded with red traffic lights, being excluded from paying subsidies.

Regarding the largest area detected by the satellites as non-compliant, APIA told us: "At the level of the request year 2023, an area of 6206.75 hectares requested for payment under the title of Permanent Meadows used individually exploited mixed was detected as non-compliant in relation to the conditions of the scheme/declared support measures being coded with a red traffic light".

According to the publication Agrointel, Veronica Topor, executive director of APIA Hunedoara, said last year that the total amount that a farmer can reach for payment for pasture is around 400-500 euros per hectare, schemes collected for direct payments and compensatory measures.

At a support of 400 euros, it would appear that for the largest non-compliant area detected last year by APIA - 6206.75 hectares of meadow - the applicant should have received a support of 2,482,700 euros. If we take into account the smallest subsidy granted for the respective land, and not the subsidies combined with the compensatory measures, i.e. the value of 100 euros per hectare, it means that the applicant caught in the wrong would have received 620,675 euros.

Regarding the monitoring of agricultural plots by satellite, a procedure that took place in our country between November 2022 and September 2023, APIA states that out of the total of 5,837,042 plots controlled by monitoring, 5,760,023 plots were declared compliant for the payment of the requested subsidies . Out of the 9.96 million hectares of land monitored by the villages, almost 9.82 million hectares were declared compliant for subsidy payment. APIA also states that out of a total of 736,247 subsidy request files, after verification, 681,838 files were approved for payment. For the difference 54,409 files, APIA continued with other verification procedures, which provide that the cancellation of the subsidy payment takes place only if the farmers have not brought verifiable evidence of the reality on the ground.

"Thus, after going through all the procedural stages, a number of 623 parcels declared by 453 farmers remained coded with red traffic light being excluded from payment", APIA representatives told us.

In the request addressed to APIA, we wanted to know what other measures public officials can take, in addition to canceling subsidies, i.e. if the situation is analyzed over several years, to discover possible subsidy fraud, and how fraudulent subsidies can be recovered .

APIA representatives answered us: "We note that the role of control through monitoring is to eliminate any suspicion regarding a possible allocation of financial resources to ineligible farmers, thus preventing a possible fraud of European funds".

In other words, the only applicable sanction is exclusion from the payment of subsidies for that year, without any verification of the documents of at least the last three years to see if that farmer has consistently reported the same cultivated area, without any verification in the field to ascertain the real situation , although APIA paid subsidies from European funds for that area. We believe that the above checks should be carried out, especially since the satellite monitoring system of agricultural plots was implemented in our country only last year, the previous period being one in which subsidies were paid only on the basis of requests made by farmers and the verifications carried out in the field, by survey, by APIA employees in the territory.

Especially since the fraud of agricultural subsidies keeps us in first place in the top of the EU member states that constantly register such irregularities. According to the PIF report (regarding the protection of the financial interests of the EU) for the year 2023 of the European Commission, 159 fraudulent acts were registered in our country that defrauded the European funds allocated for agriculture with 6,022,099 euros.