Happy Tinbergen: Switzerland's New Direct Payment System

Since the 1990s, Switzerland's agricultural policy has relied on land- and animal-based direct payments being subject to cross-compliance. Both scientists, environmentalists and industry representatives have criticised this system for handing out support without a strict orientation on the constitutional goals of Swiss agriculture. The Swiss Parliament has recently enacted a new direct payment system which, from 2014, assigns societal objectives to each kind of payment, paying tribute to the Tinbergen principle according to which each objective has to be followed by at least one instrument. Payments for Ensuring Food Supplies, for example, will be paid per hectare dependent on the production capacity, Biodiversity Payments will be paid only for land with a lot of species on it. Animal-based payments which still play an important role today are being abandoned. Although the new system is neither changing the amount of money transferred to farmers nor expected to rapidly change the structure of Swiss agriculture, it is argued that the system change may well be historic, because it makes societal transfers to agriculture more prone to critical analysis and evaluation and because it shows for the first time what the application of the Tinbergen principle to multifunctionality policy design could look like.