The Ministry of Agriculture continues to reduce the administrative burden on farmers, food producers, fishermen and foresters – Agriculture

The Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) continues to implement a series of measures and changes in the regulatory framework to reduce the administrative burden in the sectors under the supervision of the MoA. Since taking office, reducing bureaucratization has been one of the priorities of Agriculture Minister Armandas Krauze. Moreover, not only at the national level, but also at the EU level.

Measures to reduce bureaucracy take place in different directions – the most important of them is digitization. In several institutions subordinate to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, active work is currently underway on mutual integration of systems, simplification of processes and reduction of the circulation of paper documents, so that the submission of necessary data and documents becomes more convenient and faster.

Farmers and food producers have significantly less time to spend on preparation of reports and inspections, therefore the Ministry of Health institutions will reduce the number of inspections to be performed by combining them into a single inspection, when in one inspection the control will be carried out on the areas under the competence of various Ministry of Health institutions. As far as possible, inspections will be carried out remotely using statistical data and remote sensing methods. Also, the number of documents to be submitted is reduced. By integrating data systems, efforts are being made to ensure that institutions can exchange the necessary data themselves and that farmers do not have to repeatedly enter the same information. At the same time, the operation of the electronic accounting systems themselves is being developed, so that in the future farmers can use only one system for communication with state institutions. Digital services are also being developed for foresters and fishermen, improving the functionality of registers and applications.

Some examples of reducing the administrative burden:

– if until now information had to be submitted four times a year to receive direct payments, then from 2024 – only once;

– about 2,800 customers will not need to obtain and provide a bank statement on the interest paid for partial repayment of interest – the Rural Support Service will receive the information directly from the bank;

– The Food and Veterinary Service has reduced the number of inspections for animal owners, food producers and processors by approximately 2,200 inspections per year;

– The State Plant Protection Service will reduce from around 600 inspections in nurseries at professional operators to 400;

– The State Forestry Service reduces the number of inspections of producers of monitoring wood packaging material from 280 inspections to 140;

– from July 15, electronic hunting permits will be introduced, information about the hunted limited animals will be submitted electronically by the hunters of the State Forest Service to the “Mednis” application.

The digitization process also takes into account people’s convenience and for those who want it, the possibility of receiving services verbally through telephone communications has been preserved. The Rural Support Service already offers its services outside of official working hours.

The second direction in reducing the administrative burden is the priority of Armandas Krauze to prevent irrational administrative burden on Latvian farmers, foresters and fishermen, which is created at the EU level. In all high-level EU negotiations and meetings, the Minister of Agriculture has insisted on the need to review the conditions that complicate and hinder the activities of the industries.

Particularly problematic conditions have already been eliminated in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), where a new complicated funding distribution model is being introduced for the first year. Farmers will have more freedom in choosing to implement strict environmental and climate measures. And also a very important success is that the member state will be allowed to amend the very detailed national CAP Strategic Plan twice a year, thus providing an opportunity to quickly adapt to unforeseen situations in the industry and market.

These have been acute and urgent solutions, however, the minister continues to work to ensure that the policy simplification proposals submitted by Latvia during the farmers’ protests are taken into account and incorporated into EU legislation. As well as in discussions about each new proposed EU-level regulation, very important work must be done so that the new EU conditions are sufficiently easy to implement and do not complicate the work of Latvian farmers and entrepreneurs.

The Ministry of Agriculture