29.6.2009   

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

L 167/1

(1)

Council Regulation (EEC) No 837/90 of 26 March 1990 concerning statistical information to be supplied by the Member States on cereals production (2) and Council Regulation (EEC) No 959/93 of 5 April 1993 concerning statistical information to be supplied by Member States on crop products other than cereals (3) have been amended several times. Further amendments and simplifications now being necessary, these acts should, for reasons of clarity, and in accordance with the new approach to the simplification of Community legislation and better regulation (4), be replaced by one single act.

(2)

Statistics on crops are essential for management of the Community markets. It is also considered essential that vegetable and permanent crop statistics be included in addition to statistics on cereals and remaining crops from arable land, currently governed by Community legislation.

(3)

In order to ensure that the common agricultural policy is properly administered, the Commission requires that data on area, yield and production of crops are regularly provided.

(4)

Regulation (EC) No 1166/2008 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 November 2008 on farm structure surveys and the survey on agricultural production methods (5) provides for a programme of Community surveys for the provision of statistics on the structure of agricultural holdings up to 2016.

(5)

In accordance with Regulation (EC) No 1059/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 May 2003 on the establishment of a common classification of territorial units for statistics (NUTS) (6), all Member States’ statistics transmitted to the Commission which are broken down by territorial units are to use the NUTS classification. Consequently, in order to establish comparable regional statistics, the territorial units should be defined in accordance with the NUTS classification.

(6)

In order to limit the burden on Member States, regional data requirements should not exceed the requirements established by previous legislation unless new regional levels have come into existence in the meantime. Consequently, it is appropriate to allow regional statistical data for Germany and the United Kingdom to be provided for the NUTS 1 territorial units only.

(7)

In order to facilitate the implementation of this Regulation, close cooperation is necessary between Member States and the Commission, in particular with the assistance of the Standing Committee for Agricultural Statistics set up by Council Decision 72/279/EEC of 31 July 1972 (7).

(8)

In order to ensure a smooth transition from the regime applicable under Regulations (EEC) No 837/90 and (EEC) No 959/93, this Regulation should allow for the granting of a derogation for a period of not more than two years to Member States where application of this Regulation to their national statistical systems would require major adaptations and would be likely to cause significant practical problems.

(9)

The measures for the production of statistics provided for in this Regulation are necessary for carrying out the activities of the Community. Since the objective of this Regulation, namely the establishment of a common legal framework for the systematic production of Community statistics on areas under cultivation, yields and production of cereals and crops other than cereals in Member States, cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and can therefore be better achieved at Community level, the Community may adopt measures, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity as set out in Article 5 of the Treaty. In accordance with the principle of proportionality, as set out in that Article, this Regulation does not go beyond what is necessary to achieve that objective.

(10)

Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 2009 on European statistics (8) constitutes the reference framework for the provisions of this Regulation, in particular as regards conformity to standards of impartiality, reliability, relevance, cost-effectiveness, statistical confidentiality and transparency, and for the transmission and protection of confidential statistical data provided for under this Regulation, in order to ensure that no unlawful disclosure or non-statistical use takes place when Community statistics are produced and disseminated.

(11)

The measures necessary for implementation of this Regulation should be adopted in accordance with Council Decision 1999/468/EC of 28 June 1999 laying down the procedures for the exercise of implementing powers conferred on the Commission (9).

(12)

In particular, the Commission should be empowered to modify the transmission tables. Since those measures are of general scope and are designed to amend non-essential elements of this Regulation, inter alia, by supplementing it with new non-essential elements, they must be adopted in accordance with the regulatory procedure with scrutiny provided for in Article 5a of Decision 1999/468/EC.

(13)

Council Regulation (EC) No 834/2007 of 28 June 2007 on organic production and labelling of organic products (10) provides for an obligation to transmit relevant statistical information as defined within the context of the Community Statistical Programme to the Commission. Recognising that there is a need for the systematic production of Community statistics on organic production and farming, it is anticipated that the Commission will take appropriate action, including the submission of a legislative proposal, to adequately address this issue.

(14)

This Regulation does not affect the voluntary provision by Members States of the statistics of the Early Estimates for Crop Products (EECP).

(15)

The Standing Committee for Agricultural Statistics has been consulted,

(a)

‘harvest year’ means the calendar year in which the harvest begins;

(b)

‘utilised agricultural area’ means the total area taken up by arable land, permanent grassland, permanent crops and kitchen gardens used by the holdings, regardless of the type of tenure or whether it is used as common land;

(c)

‘area under cultivation’ means the area that corresponds to the total sown area, but after the harvest it excludes ruined areas (e.g. due to natural disasters);

(d)

‘cropped area’ means the area that corresponds to the total sown area for producing a specific crop during a given year;

(e)

‘harvested area’ means the part of the cropped area that is harvested. It can, therefore, be equal to or less than the cropped area;

(f)

‘production area’, in connection with permanent crops, means the area that can potentially be harvested in the reference harvest year. It excludes all non-producing areas, such as new plantations that have not yet started to produce;

(g)

‘harvested production’ means production including on-holding losses and wastage, quantities consumed directly on the farm and marketed quantities, indicated in units of basic product weight;

(h)

‘yield’ means the harvested production per area under cultivation;

(i)

‘crops under glass or high (accessible) cover’ means crops which, for the whole of their period of growth or for the predominant part of it, are covered by greenhouses or fixed or mobile high cover (glass or rigid or flexible plastic). This excludes sheets of plastic laid flat on the ground, as well as land under cloches or tunnels not accessible to man or movable glass-covered frames. Areas of crops which are grown temporarily under glass and temporarily in the open air are reported as entirely under glass, unless the period under glass is of extremely limited duration;

(j)

‘main area’ of a given parcel means the area where the parcel has been used only once during a given crop year, and which is unequivocally defined by that use.

(a)

total area under cultivation of crops from arable land (Table 1);

(b)

total harvested area of vegetables, melons and strawberries (Table 2);

(c)

total production area of permanent crops (Table 3);

(d)

utilised agricultural area (Table 4).

(a)

‘relevance’, which refers to the degree to which statistics meet current and potential needs of the users;

(b)

‘accuracy’, which refers to the closeness of estimates to the unknown true values;

(c)

‘timeliness’, which refers to the period between the availability of the information and the event or phenomenon it describes;

(d)

‘punctuality’, which refers to the delay between the date of the release of the data and the target date (the date by which the data should have been delivered);

(e)

‘accessibility’ and ‘clarity’, which refer to the conditions and modalities by which users can obtain, use and interpret data;

(f)

‘comparability’, which refers to the measurement of the impact of differences in applied statistical concepts, measurement tools and procedures when statistics are compared between geographical areas, sectoral domains or over time;

(g)

‘coherence’, which refers to the adequacy of the data to be reliably combined in different ways and for various uses.

(a)

the organisation of the surveys covered by this Regulation and the methodology applied;

(b)

the level of precision achieved for the sample surveys referred to in this Regulation; and

(c)

the quality of sources other than surveys which are used.