Greece's CAP Agri-Environment-Climate Payments — Extensive Farming & Organic Transition

Greece has run a national agri-environment-climate payment scheme since Measure 10 of its 2014-2022 Rural Development Programme (adopted by the European Commission in December 2015), which the European Commission's own factsheet lists with an indicative allocation of €622.3 million (about 8% of the €7.78 billion programme). The scheme pays farmers, via the Ministry of Rural Development and Food and its paying agency OPEKEPE, for practices such as organic farming and livestock maintenance, extensive grazing, terraced-land upkeep, and protection of high-environmental-value landscapes, alongside Pillar-II compensatory payments for farming in mountainous and other naturally constrained areas.

Under the current CAP Strategic Plan (2023-2027), Greece's own Annual Performance Report for its first implementation year (16 October 2023 to 15 October 2024), accepted by the European Commission in October 2025, records real payments made rather than plans: €164.3 million was actually disbursed for organic-farming maintenance, covering 750,984 hectares (138% of the planned area, though only 70% of the planned budget); €12.4 million was paid for extensive-grazing livestock management across 487,267 hectares (59% of plan); and €240.5 million in total public funds went to compensatory payments for farming in areas with natural constraints (102% of plan, fully executed). By contrast, terraced-cultivation maintenance reached only 29% of its planned budget (€3.25m of €11.25m planned) and landscape-protection payments only 13% (€0.40m of €3.15m planned).

The same report is explicit that several of the most directly biodiversity-targeted interventions — including Natura 2000 bird and large-carnivore (wolf and bear) coexistence payments, organic-farming conversion (as distinct from maintenance), organic beekeeping, and autochthonous-breed conservation — recorded zero actual payments in this first year, attributed to IT-system and call-publication delays; the report's own biodiversity result indicator for forest/Natura 2000 land under commitment (targeted at 6,675 ha) was correspondingly not met. This echoes a longer-standing pattern: Eurostat recorded only 1.8% of Greek utilised agricultural area under agri-environmental commitments in 2013, and the European Court of Auditors' general findings on agri-environment schemes across the EU — vague objectives, weak outcome monitoring, imperfect targeting — plausibly extend to Greece as a member state operating under the same CAP rules, though Greece was not among the ECA's specific audited case-study countries.

Read the full analysis: https://www.agrotikianaptixi.gr/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/etisia-ekthesi-epidoseon-2025.pdf