Interview with the National Paying Agency of Lithuania

Currently in the National Paying Agency of Lithuania (NPA), Direct Green Payments & Rural Development Payments eligibility and baseline requirements are controlled only by executing field visits and by visual assessment based on VHR and Sentinel NDVI images. Lithuania as a Nordic country, encounters limitations in the use of remote sensing technology in automating control checks due to increased cloud coverage. Therefore NPA, representing Lithuania in this project, is interested in promotion of additional innovative tools that would allow to resolve the existing problem.

The main interest of NPA is testing the DIONE toolbox-based automated assessment of eligibility and baseline requirements, as regards I and II Pillars of the Common Agricultural Policy, defining which of them can be effectively monitored using EO-based technology. There is a concrete operational interest on the outcomes of the DIONE toolbox evaluation, so as to create a final tool for monitoring approach, that NPA would use. This would be done by selecting a sufficiently large pool of farmers to be able to receive meaningful conclusions, reflecting all respective requirements, including all sizes of parcels, crop types, etc.

Implementation of DIONE can improve the overall administration and control processes in NPA and subsequently, reduce the administrative burden as well as increase the satisfaction and trust level of ~130 000 clients (farmers) making the whole process clearer, easier and more transparent. During the implementation of the project, NPA as one of the most technologically advanced institutions in Lithuania, will have a possibility to choose support measures that should be monitored through the automated assessment. Moreover, NPA will be able to manage more efficiently the human resources by respectively distributing the assignments for the inspectors, thus ensuring a more balanced workload which will result in reducing the costs for controls. DIONE will give a good opportunity to achieve real benefits to the environment via constant monitoring and assessing environmental performance on the national level.