EU: Council and Parliament reach provisional political agreement on the new Regulation on agricultural input and output statistics (SAIO)

The French Presidency of the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament reached a provisional political agreement on a new regulation on statistics on agricultural inputs and products (SAIO). This regulation is part of the modernization of the European system of agricultural statistics and, by improving and strengthening statistics on agricultural inputs and products in agriculture, should help to improve knowledge of agricultural practices and production in connection with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the Green Pact for Europe and the "farm to fork" strategy.

The revision of the SAIO regulation concerns data on agricultural production, crop products, agricultural inputs and prices. It will aim to provide more accurate statistics on agricultural inputs (prices of seeds, pesticides, feed, etc.) and products (crop and livestock production and prices) collected from farms, administrative sources, intermediaries (dairies, etc.), wholesale entities and market organizations.

The co-legislators agreed on the scope of the new SAIO regulation, the frequency of transmission of the data collected, in particular for plant protection products (PPP) and organic farming. As regards organic farming, the co-legislators agreed on the need to ensure that the available statistics are consistent with other agricultural production statistics by integrating them into the datasets.

For plant protection products (PPPs), a transitional period of three years from 2025 has been agreed, with an intermediate data collection for the reference year 2026. From base year 2028 onwards, data collection will be annual with annual publication from 2030 onwards. However, these annual data collections are conditional on the existence of electronic registers for professional users of plant protection products. The collection of PPP data will be based on a common list of representative crops, which will evolve during the transition period. The SAIO Regulation provides for European funding during this transitional period to help national statistical authorities prepare for the annual collection of PPP data.

Finally, the co-legislators agreed that the revised SAIO regulation should contain appropriate safeguard clauses to avoid an increased administrative burden for farmers and national administrations.

Background

On 2 February 2021, the Commission published the proposal for the SAIO Regulation. The proposal establishes a framework for aggregated European statistics on the inputs and outputs of agricultural activities, as well as the intermediate use of these outputs within agriculture and their collection and industrial processing. In the Council, the working group on statistics started the examination of the proposal for a regulation on the SAIO as early as 19 February 2021. The Council and the Parliament started inter-institutional negotiations on 3 February 2022 to come to the agreement reached today.

Next steps

The provisional political agreement must be approved by the Council and the European Parliament. On the Council side, it will be submitted shortly to the Special Committee on Agriculture (SCA) before moving on to the formal stages of the adoption procedure.