ANNUAL REPORT 2006
After the signing of the Luxembourg Agreement in June 2003, most countries decided to apply the central feature of the reform, namely the Single Farm Payment (SFP), as soon as possible in 2005. Other Member States (among them, France and Spain) decided to start with the implementation of the SFP only in 2006. However, at the mid-term period of the Forecast exercise (2010-2011), the CAP reform will be fully implemented in all Member States of the European Union.
decrease otherwise attributed to the Single Farm Payment and cross-compliance measures.
N+P+K), is still slightly smaller than the decrease in the EU15 countries (0.96 million tonnes for N+P+K).
In sum, our Forecast predicts a continuation of the general downward trend in fertilizer use in the EU-15. More specifically, consumption of the three major nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, will decline by -3.5%, -12.1% and -10.7% respectively over the next ten years.
In another important development, the Commission has decided to support energy crops to help meet the EU target of 5.75% biofuels in 2010. This decision favours the cropping of cereals and oilseeds for that purpose, and part of set-aside land can be devoted to it. For the EU-15, the combination of these two factors will lead to a -4.5% decrease of cereal area (only -2.9% for wheat) and a +55% increase of the oilseed rape area. Non-cropped set-aside should decrease by -1.7 million hectares, whereas set-aside used for energy and industrial crops should increase by +1.8 million hectares, resulting in a total set-aside rate of some 11.4% of the base area.
For the new Member States, a significant increase in consumption is foreseen: +32% for nitrogen, +17% for phosphorus and +18% for potassium, and is linked to an expected +19% increase in cereal production. These results appear more optimistic than those obtained through the 2005 Forecast. Poland is the main reason for this new trend, since this country accounts for 55% the total nutrients consumption of the EU-10. The overall increase in the EU-10 countries, in absolute figures (0.80 million tonnes for
However, at EU-25 level and for the first time in a decade for the EU in general, the consumption of nitrogen will increase moderately by 0.28 million tonnes (+2.5%), while the next ten years will see phosphorus and potassium both continuing to decline by -0.23 and -0.22 million tonnes respectively. This gives the following absolute tonnages for the EU-25: on average over the last three seasons, fertilizers carrying 10.49 million tonnes of nitrogen, 3.24 million tonnes of phosphorus, and 3.68 million tonnes of potassium, have been applied to 133.26 million hectares of farmland each season (51.8 million hectares are not fertilized). By 2016, the forecasters expect these figures to have increased for nitrogen to 10.75 million tonnes, and to have dropped to 3.00 and 3.46 million tonnes for phosphorus and potassium respectively.
Fertilizer Nutrient Consumption in the EU-25 As for other cropping patterns, wheat areas will decrease slightly while sugar beet acreage will continue to decrease more drastically (-20% foreseen for the planted area, when production will decline by only -5%) as a consequence of the new sugar regime after 2009. However, these figures are already taking into account the development of bioethanol. The decrease in fertilizer use is predicted in almost all EU15 Member States. The only slight increase of nitrogen in Denmark, Sweden and Austria is due to a particularly bad current base situation. In France, the stable forecast is due to the development of energy crops compensating the
Nutrient (million tonnes) 15
N P205
12
K20
9
6
3
0 1950
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1965
1970
1975
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2006
2010
2016
15