A new Eurobarometer public opinion poll shows widespread support among European citizens for the Commission’s main CAP reform proposals. The poll, conducted by TNS Opinion and Social, interviewed 26,713 adults, enough for a representative sample in each member state.

The first question, concerning setting a cap on the amount of aid to the largest farms found that 47% of respondents favour a limit while 28% opposed a limit. 15 per cent didn’t know. Support for capping was strongest in Cyprus (+54%), Denmark (+36%), Finland (+33%) and Sweden (29%). Malta was the only country where more people thought a limit was a bad thing (-20%). In the agriculture council the strongest opponents of capping have traditionally been the UK, Germany, Czech Republic and Slovakia. However, in each of these countries, a clear plurality of citizens favoured capping subsidies to larger farms.

A second question asked about strengthening the link between direct payments and the protection of the environment. The Commission was attempting to get at the question of whether environmental aspects of the CAP should be applied across the entire EU territory or concentrated in areas of particular ecological importance. The Commission’s proposals for a ‘greening’ component of Pillar 1 to be accessible to all farms show that it favours an across-the-board approach. By a margin of 11 per cent, citizens supported the Commission’s proposal.

Environmentalists, who have long campaigned for subsidies to be linked to ecological farming, have cause to be concerned that a spontaneous answer (i.e. an answer that was not offered as an option by the interviewer) that there should be no environmental conditionality at all, was volunteered by 10 per cent of respondents across the EU and by more than 15 per cent of respondents in Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Hungary, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and the UK.

A third question asks about locally-produced food and local food markets. There was strong support for local food and local food labelling but respondents were even split on the question of how easy or difficult it is to identify whether a food product comes from a local farm or not.

A fourth question on transparency in CAP beneficiaries found that across the EU some 62 per cent of respondents favoured publication of the names of beneficiaries of CAP payments and the amounts they receive, while 22 per cent opposed the idea. Support for transparency was strongest Slovakia (+78%), Czech Republic (+60%), Greece (+56%) and the UK (+54%). In all countries more people favoured transparency than opposed it though the minority in favour of non-disclosure was largest in the Netherlands, Denmark, Latvia and Austria.

Eurobarometer polls must always be taken with a grain or two of salt. The Commission pays for them and has a strong input into the design of the survey. Eurobarometer rarely puts questions that might give awkward answers for the EU and rarely asks respondents to confront the trade-offs inherent in policy choices. Worse, the surveys are prone to ask loaded questions that appear almost guaranteed to produce the answers the Commission wants. Nevertheless there are very few other surveys on EU affairs nor of the scale of Eurobarometer in terms of sample size. Looking into differences between respondents in different member states can be very informative, as can looking at the answers broken down by socio-demographic divisions.

The full report is available for download (PDF).

Today, farmsubsidy.org revealed the results of an intensive two-day harvest of new farm subsidy data published by the European Union’s member states in accordance with the new laws on disclosure of beneficiaries of EU funds.

The data, relating to payments made in 2009, has been harvested from twenty seven government websites, in some cases using advanced computer programming techniques. So far, data on 38.3 billion euros of payments have been harvested (from a total CAP budget of 55 billion euros). In some cases member states have made the data easy to access, in other cases they appear to take deliberate steps to block access. As at 11am on Tuesday 4 May, 99% complete data has been obtained from 21 member states. Only partial data from France, Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Portugal. The United Kingdom has withheld all its data for political reasons until after this week’s general election (though the Scottish Government has published its data).

Farmsubsidy.org’s 2009 millionaires list (beneficiaries that received more than a million euros) shows a significant increase over last year. In 2008 we identified 1,040 farm subsidy millionaires. In 2009 already some 1,212 have been identified, receiving a combined total of 4.9 billion euros. This number is likely to rise as it does not include all data from Portugal and the UK. We expect that ultimately there will be a third more farm subsidy millionaires in 2009 than in 2008.

This year, the country with the largest number of farm subsidy millionaires is Germany. Between them, Germany’s 268 millionaire recipients took some 622,594,805 euros. France’s 174 farm subsidy millionaires, many of which are banana-producing companies in French overseas territories, took a combined 1,016,241,476 euros.

As was the case in 2008, the list of top recipients is dominated by sugar processing companies.

While the data does not indicate why these payments to sugar companies were made, it may be assumed they are part of the EU’s programme for ‘restructuring’ the sugar sector. This involves processing companies that wish to stay in business paying a levy into an EU fund to ‘buy out’ those companies giving up their processing quotas. Processing quotas are valuable because the EU price for sugar is fixed well above world market prices, representing a hidden subsidy from European consumers to sugar producers.

Other top recipients include dairy processing and trading companies that have benefitted from the reintroduction of the EU’s export subsidies for milk powder and butter, which enable them to dump excess European milk production on world markets. Export subsidies were reintroduced as part of the EU’s bail out of the dairy sector after milk prices fell from record highs in 2007/08 to record lows in 2009.

At the other end of the scale the data harvest has revealed some very small payments, some less than a euro. It is assumed that the costs of administering such modest aid payments vastly exceeds the face value of the payments.

According to the data from Sweden, which includes personal identification numbers, the youngest recipient of CAP funds is just 14 years old, while two Swedish recipients are 100 years old, though both are dead. The oldest living Swedish CAP recipient is a 98-year-old woman living in Dalsland.

A number of curious recipients of CAP funds was also revealed, illustrating the diversity of beneficiaries: an accordion club (Sweden – €59,585.10), a billiard club (Denmark – €31,515, a payment for beer and soft drinks), a Juri High School alumni society (Estonia – €44,884), Ons Genoegen ice skating club (Netherlands – €162,444), the Sint Maarten amateur football club (Netherlands – €354,566.62) and Schipol Airport in the Netherlands (€98,864.33). As in previous years, a number of banks and horse riding clubs were among the beneficiaries.
In Bulgaria, the national CAP paying agency appears to have paid itself a sum in excess of a million euros as well as payments to the 26-year-old daughter of the former Bulgarian deputy agriculture minister (who had responsibility for EU funds) in excess of €700,000 euros.

Farmsubsidy.org has also published an evaluation of which member states are meeting high standards of budget transparency, and which are failing.

The decision of UK civil servants to withhold the data during the general election campaign is without precedent and has provoked the disapproval of the Commission. According to the UK’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which has previously backed transparency in farm subsidies, the decision was made in the interests of political candidates who are beneficiaries of CAP funds.

The transparency ranking is topped by Hungary. Hungary also deserves special mention as the ‘most improved’ member state. Last year, the Hungarian government published data in an exceptionally unhelpful way: a series of PDF files that ran to thousands of pages. This year, the Hungarian government has provided comprehensive information on both EU-funded farm subsides and nationally-funded farm subsidies, in a user-friendly bulk-downloadable, electronic format. Other countries that have followed the best practice of providing the ‘raw data’ are Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Sweden.

This year’s transparency villains are Austria, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Portugal and Slovakia. These countries have all refused to provide the data for bulk download and their websites require ‘web-scraping’ robots to be programmed to harvest the data.

Greece is a particular problem case, suggesting that the Greek government’s difficulties with basic numeracy are not confined to its budget deficit. The Greek government’s farm subsidy website very inaccessible and the data presented on it contain arithmetical errors. For example, the published figure for total payments to certain beneficiaries was found to be less than the sum of the payments listed for those beneficiaries. A case of two plus two equalling one.

This is only the first cut of the 2009 data. More analysis is to come…

Last Friday, Le Monde, the leading French daily newspaper, devoted a double-page spread on its comment pages to the common agricultural policy. Along with José Bové, Michiel A. Keyzer and Jean-Christophe Bureau I was invited to contribute an article to the debate. You can read it in French on the Le Monde website. I’ve posted an English version below.

Farming should protect Europe’s environmental resources not use them up

In 2009, farm incomes fell across the whole of the EU, not least in France. Dairy farms have been hardest hit with average prices down twenty per cent. This is despite the EU spending 55 billion euro on the common agricultural policy, one of whose aims is to ensure farmers a fair standard of living.

Not long ago the lists of who gets what from farm subsidies were considered ‘state secrets’. No wonder. They reveal that far from supporting small family farms, as the public might suppose, the CAP is lining the pockets of Europe’s biggest landowners and agri-businesses. The data shows that across Europe, 85 per cent of aid goes to the top 17 per cent of recipients.

This is because under the twisted logic of the CAP, the biggest farms with the best land get the most public assistance. Besides helping the rich get richer and big farms to buy out their smaller neighbours, subsidies for land ownership and production rights creates a kind of closed shop. Young farmers must buy their way in and are saddled with heavy debts.

Modern agriculture has brought an abundance of food but it has come at a price that goes beyond the financial costs of the CAP. Over the past quarter century, 40 per cent Europe’s farmland birds have disappeared. Bee colonies, so necessary for pollination of arable crops, are experiencing sudden collapse. Rivers and seas are fouled with fertilizers, pesticides and animal effluent. Each year more ancient natural pasture is put to the plough and more wetlands are drained: once gone, forever lost. The CAP has done little to help. In France, for example, payments for farmland conservation amount to 380 million euro in 2008. They are dwarfed by old-style subsidies of 9.34 billion euro.

Things have improved a little in the past few years and Europe is no longer hurting farmers in developing countries by dumping big surpluses overseas. Farmers are mostly free to farm to market demand rather than to government diktat. Yet these reforms have been opposed at every turn by farm unions and the politicians and civil servants in ministries of agriculture, between whom there are often close ties.

And now, even this modest progress is at risk from a new wind of protectionism blowing across the continent. With a growing world population and a changing climate the question of how humanity will feed itself is back on the political agenda. And rightly so. During the winter of 2007/08, food prices leaped to record levels and the world’s poor faced hunger and even comparatively wealthy Europeans felt the pinch. The response in some quarters has been to adopt a siege mentality and aim for self-sufficiency in food. Why, it is argued, should we put ourselves at the mercy of global markets when there is more we can squeeze out of our own lands?

To base an entire agriculture policy on this logic would be a mistake. Seductive though it may be, the promise of European food self-sufficiency is an illusion as it would come through even greater dependency on on imports of natural gas from Russia for fertilizer and oil from the Middle East to run farm machinery.

Instead of a renewed push for unsustainable agricultural intensification, we should encourage more environmentally-friendly farming. Climate change will increase the risk of drought, flooding and poor harvests and the frightening reality is that any food shortages we may have experienced lately are nothing compared to what we might expect mid-century. We would be wise to safeguard the fertility of our own over-exploited soils, conserve our own precious water, protect the biodiversity we need for the pollination of fruits and vegetables and the ecological resources we will need in an uncertain future. In Europe there is little ‘spare land’ to cultivate and big increases in yields will be hard to find. Increasing global food production can best be achieved by helping farmers in poorer countries whose agricultural productivity lags far behind ours.

Following the election of a new European Parliament and the appointment of a new Commission, the EU will this year embark on a fundamental review of its agriculture policy, which still accounts for 40 per cent of the community’s entire budget. Aside from providing income support to a sector of society that is, more often than not, richer than the average citizen, taxpayers get little for our money. The future must be a common European policy to protect and preserve Europe’s lands, recognising the role played by sustainable farming.

It is certain that such a shift will be fought hard by those who have got used to receiving ‘money for nothing’ but at a time when government budgets are under such strain, we cannot go on like this. In 2009 we discovered where money goes and witnessed the sheer the waste and inequity of a system that in 2008 paid 1,583,120 euro to Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein and 253,987 euro to Prince Albert of Monaco. This year we must start taking action to build a better policy.

Jack Thurston is co-founder of farmsubsidy.org, a network of journalists, researchers and activists pushing for greater transparency in the CAP.