Accurate Subsidies for Farmers in Portugal

Laser-Scan (UK) and Intergraph Portugal deliver a solution to ensure accurate agricultural grant payments to Portuguese farmers.

The National Institute of Agricultural Intervention and Guarantee (INGA) is a Portuguese government agency which co-ordinates and pays EU subsidies to over 400,000 Portuguese farmers per year – the annual grant total averages € 699 million. INGA is implementing a joint Laser-Scan/Intergraph solution to ensure a more efficient administration of the identification system which manages the geographic land parcels. This is fundamental to the success of the new system.

The amount of EU subsidy payable to each farmer is directly calculated from features stored within INGA’s existing national dataset of 4 million land parcel polygon features. Errors within this dataset (geometric problems with overlaps and gaps at feature boundaries) lead to under- or over- payments.

INGA is using Radius Topology to detect and correct any errors in the data to ensure that the correct subsidy is paid; this process will also enable INGA to deliver accurate information to organisations and citizens over the Internet via Intergraph’s GeoMedia WebMap application. There are also future plans to enable online updates using GeoMedia WebMap Pro.