by Majeed Saleh.
Every now and then a small campaign group comes along that harnesses the international reach of the internet to punch well above its weight. One such is Farmsubsidy.org, a small lobby group founded by British and Danish activists to shine a light into an expensive corner of European government that had previously remained stubbornly in the dark.
Every year the EU distributes 55 billion Euros in agricultural subsidies, courtesy of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). These payments account for more than 40 per cent of the EU’s annual budget, but until recently detailed information on precisely how the money was being spent was hard to find.
Farmsubsidy.org (http://www.farmsubsidy.org/) was founded in 2005 in an attempt to make details of the payment of subsidies available for public scrutiny. The site brought together data obtained through freedom of information requests from national governments and EU bodies, analysing and reporting on their findings and presenting the data so any European citizen can understand it for themselves.
One of the inspirations behind the website was the US Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy database which offers state-by-state summaries of subsidies received, as well as detailed information on individual awards to farmers and agribusinesses (see http://farm.ewg.org/farm/ ).
Since the European site was founded it has helped to generate a number of headlines. The CAP was devised to support struggling farmers but in practice the vast majority of subsidies are now taken by large companies and wealthy farmers.
According to Jack Thurston, the campaign’s British co-founder, some 85 per cent of payments are given to just 17 per cent of the recipients. In 2004-05 the largest recipient of EU farming subsidies in the UK was the sugar company Tate and Lyle, receiving more than 125 million pounds, about three times the amount received by the second largest recipient.
Another example is the airline Lufthansa which is in receipt of substantial subsidies on the basis that each time a Lufthansa aircraft carrying in-flight meals travels beyond the borders of the EU, they technically become food exporters. The British division of this company alone received more than 80,000 pounds in subsidies during the 2004-05 period.
Unfortunately, not all EU members are keen to share the data on what their farmers were receiving from the CAP, and there are still a few key gaps in the information that is available. Farmsubsidy.org is campaigning for changes in the law on a national and European level to provide greater transparency, and has produced a transparency league table based on the degree to which each state makes subsidy information accessible. This list is topped by Sweden, and the UK is 9th, with joint last place falling to Austria, Cyprus, Greece, Luxembourg, Malta, Bulgaria and Romania, all of whom provide no information for one reason or another (see
http://farmsubsidy.org/transparency_league ).
Since the campaign began, some new EU transparency regulations have been introduced, which have made it a requirement for member states to provide the details of subsidies in a way that makes it accessible to scrutiny and analysis, for example by name, municipality and amount received.
However, despite the data being issued centrally by the EU, there is no central public resource through which the public might access the data, with each state running its own website, meaning there are as many as 27 different sites, each one conforming to a different format, standard and layout resulting in varied accessibility.
One of the problems faced by farmsubsidy.org, for example, is the tendency of governments to release their data in pdf format, which can make it even more difficult to extract. Thurston argued that more data standards were needed to ensure the data was distributed consistently and accessibly throughout Europe.
These websites are still coming online but Thurston says the UK site provides a good example of best practice, providing for a range of different search and sorting options ( http://cap-payments.defra.gov.uk/ ). On the other hand, Thurston said, the Irish government apparently wants to make the data as difficult to access as possible; the only way to find information on subsidy in the Republic of Ireland is if you already know the name and location of the recipient.
Recently, Farmsubsidy.org announced a new phase in its project. With the help of Google maps, users can now view the subsidies in the form of a map of recipients’ locations which includes indicators as to the size of the grant. Currently only Sweden (in keeping with its position at the top of the transparency league table) has its subsidies mapped in this way, but the fight continues. In the modern world, information is much harder to hide.
NOTE: Jack Thurston was a plenary speaker at E-Democracy ’08, hosted in London last month by E-Government Bulletin publisher Headstar:
http://www.headstar-events.com/edemocracy08.
