Last week Oliver Sitar, Director of the European Commission’s (EC) Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development (DG Agri), accompanied by representatives of the EC agricultural and rural development policy sector, and of the Ministry of Agriculture, visited the National Paying Agency (NPA) in Lithuania.
The purpose of the visit to the NPA was to familiarise with the institution’s key processes, the principles of EU support administration and monitoring. The EC representative was particularly interested in the NPA as an organisation with its 26 years of experience, annually paying out around 1 billion euros of the EU support to the agricultural sector. In his presentation, NPA Deputy Director Tomas Orlickas explained how the agency’s knowledge and experience have been accumulated, applied and improved on a regular basis, thus shaping the unique history of the NPA’s activities. He also outlined the innovative tools that are actively implemented and used, as well as their benefits and future prospects. The NPA Deputy Director also highlighted the role of international projects with the participation of the NPA. These initiatives play a significant role in further development, testing and introduction of innovations in the daily activities of the institution.
Among the highlighted projects – OASIS project, funded under the Interreg Latvia–Lithuania 2021-2027 programme, with its purpose to enable more effective use of Earth observation and artificial intelligence to improve agriculture, land monitoring, and public sector services in the cross-border regions of Lithuania and Latvia. As a result, the two-year project will be delivering enhanced imagery, parcel delineation outputs, and integration into existing systems. The enhanced satellite imagery (Sentinel-2, 1-metre resolution) will support automatic delineation of parcel boundaries.
The guest was especially impressed by the advanced remote monitoring tools that are used and continuously developed by the NPA and expressed his positive view on their further elaboration. This area attracted significant interest and numerous questions from the visitors regarding both the current benefits of these tools – ensuring the quality, efficiency, convenience and reliability of inspections – and their future perspectives. EC representative Oliver Sitar noted that the NPA’s operations and certain processes, particularly inspections, deserve attention across Europe, and that innovative technologies, such as satellite-assisted optimisation of monitoring, should serve as an example for institutions working in the agricultural sectors of other EU Member States. He expressed a firm position that the dialogue between the NPA and EC representatives should continue.
Oliver Sitar’s visit to the NPA was an important part of his broader mission to gain first-hand insight into Lithuania’s agricultural sector, with the aim of ensuring a fair and robust future for the EU Common Agricultural Policy and support conditions in the 2028–2034 financial perspective. The visit was organised by the EC Representation in Lithuania, in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture.