Opinion on 2024 discharge: General budget of the EU - Commission (COM (2025) 824 final

04.12.2025

Mr Niclas Herbst

Chair

Committee on Budgetary Control

BRUSSELS

Subject: Opinion on 2024 discharge: General budget of the EU - Commission (COM (2025) 824 final (COM(2025)0359 – C100145/2025 – 2025/2145(DEC))

Dear Chair,

Under the procedure referred to above, the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development has been asked to submit an opinion to your committee. At its meeting of 24 September 2025, the AGRI coordinators decided that the Committee should issue its opinion in the form of a Chair’s letter.

The Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development adopted this letter on 12 January 2026 and asks the Committee on Budgetary Control, as the responsible committee, to take the following points into account when preparing the motion for a resolution.

1. Welcomes the Commission’s overall assessment that the EU budget continued to deliver across priorities in 2024 despite multiple crises and transitions, with total payments executed amounting to EUR 182.6 billion and commitment appropriations executed at 97.2 % of the budget;

2. Draws attention to the continuing centrality of agriculture and rural development for the EU budget: expenditure under Heading 3 (‘Natural resources and environment’), overwhelmingly CAP-related, remains a major budgetary item and requires continued monitoring in the discharge exercise;

3. Welcomes the Commission’s move to a risk-categorisation approach for performance-based expenditure and the reported high share of low-risk expenditure for natural resources in 2024 and stresses the need to maintain transparency on how this new approach is applied to CAP expenditure;

4. Notes with concern the low absorption of European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development payments in the early years of the 2023-2027 programming period and stresses that delayed payments undermine farmers’ income stability; calls on the Commission and Member States to accelerate disbursements and mobilise measures to increase absorption where delays persist, ensuring balanced support across all regions;

5. Welcomes the Commission’s emphasis on annual performance reporting (APRs) under the new CAP delivery model and calls on the Commission to support Member States in finalising APR systems and to foster comparability of indicators across Member States;

6. Notes the European Court of Auditors’ (ECA) 2025 conclusions on EU funding for forest-fire-related action: while Member States increasingly used EU funds for prevention, the Commission had an incomplete overview of total forest-fire spending and monitoring of results was weak, an issue with clear agricultural and rural implications; calls on the Commission to improve aggregation of forest-fire related spending and to strengthen monitoring of outcomes and long-term sustainability of preventive measures;

7. Stresses that in the context of growing natural-disaster risks the Commission and Member States must ensure that EU-funded prevention measures are well-targeted, based on up-to-date risk assessments, and sustained beyond one-off project cycles so that investments deliver lasting benefits for agriculture and rural communities;

8. Draws attention to the ECA’s 2025 assessment of EU budget flexibility which found that, although flexibility tools have allowed the EU to respond to major shocks, the framework is complex, and some instruments have been rapidly depleted; stresses that predictable and coherent budgetary arrangements are essential for long-term agricultural resilience and for funding multi-year preventive actions in rural areas;

9. Calls on the Commission to ensure that the post-2027 Multiannual Financial Framework proposal takes account of the need for adequate funding as well as clearly prioritised flexibility to address recurrent natural-disaster risks affecting agriculture (e.g. fires, droughts, floods), while safeguarding long-term programme funding;

10. Notes the ECA’s findings that rural development measures and eco-schemes are more exposed to material error, often due to scheme complexity and national “gold-plating”; welcomes the conclusion that direct payments (excluding eco-schemes) remain free of material error while acknowledging that eco-schemes involve a higher degree of inherent complexity and that their correct implementation proved challenging; highlights that most errors are administrative in nature; underlines that, according to ECA, the estimated level of administrative error (44% of all errors) would have been significantly lower had Member State authorities made full use of available information;

11. Highlights the ECA’s recommendation that the Commission provide additional support to Member States in designing less complex schemes, without compromising their ambition; calls on the Commission, notably through knowledge sharing, to assist Member States in improving governance systems and implementing eco-schemes;

12. Draws attention to the need for simplification, the use of enhanced digital tools, and stronger controls to reduce ineligible expenditure, and stresses the importance of reducing excessive administrative, reporting and regulatory burdens on farmers to strengthen sound financial management, as the occurrence of errors often results from overly complex procedures, without compromising the EU environmental objectives;

13. Calls on the Commission to support Member States in targeting funds to high-value preventive measures (e.g. landscape management, maintenance of agricultural firebreaks, restoration of degraded soils, purchase and supply of veterinary vaccines) and to promote the dissemination of best practices and effective projects across Member States.

Yours sincerely,

Veronika Vrecionová

ANNEX: DECLARATION OF INPUT

The Chair declares under her exclusive responsibility that she did not include in her opinion input from interest representatives falling within the scope of the Interinstitutional Agreement on a mandatory transparency register, or from representatives of public authorities of third countries, including their diplomatic missions and embassies, to be listed in this Annex pursuant to Article 8 of Annex I to the Rules of Procedure.