As people who climb a mountain or run a marathon would know, one of the best feelings in life is the satisfaction of achieving a goal after working long and hard to get there. Today, I reach a goal which I set out when taking office in 2004: to get the Court of Auditors’ seal of approval on how we spend the agricultural part of the EU budget.

Year after year, we have improved our record. Last year we came so close that we could almost hear the Champagne corks pop but today marks a milestone. For the first time ever, the EU’s financial watchdog has given spending on Agriculture and Natural Resources a green light. In other words: our books are in order.

This success comes mainly thanks to recent reforms of the CAP, which have greatly simplified things for farmers and administrators. Error rates are also decreasing for rural development policy. There is still room for improvement, in particular in the area of agri-environmental schemes where the commitments farmers have to respect are very detailed and complex. This does not mean that the policy is bad or that the projects failed. It merely means that they are difficult and expensive to check and that makes it difficult to reduce errors.

We should also be very proud of achieving these major improvements at the time of the biggest enlargement in the EU’s history. It is a clear pat on the shoulder for the New Member States, which have made great efforts to successfully introduce the necessary agricultural controls in a very short space of time.

Last year we threw open the curtains on the CAP so people can now go online to see who gets what from the agricultural budget.  But taxpayers also have the right to know that their money is spent correctly and that it reaches the right recipients. We have now got the Court of Auditors’ word that it does and that is, quite frankly, extremely satisfactory!

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