Fields of Gold: Lifting the Veil on Europe's Farm Subsidies

Europeans at the supermarket.

On average we spend a sixth of our income on food, drinks and tobacco,

a good deal of which comes from Europe’s four million farms.

But as well as what we spend at the shops,

through our taxes we pay for a system of farm subsidies worth 55 billion euro a year.

That’s more than €100 a year for every man, woman and child.

But where does this money go?

For decades this was a closely guarded secret.

I’m Jack Thurston and this is the story

of how a group of journalists and activists

fought governments and powerful farm lobbies

to find out the truth about who gets what from the common agricultural policy.

For me, it all began almost ten years ago when I was working

as a political adviser to the agriculture minister in this building here.

One afternoon I was looking over the minister’s shoulder

at a list of the top twenty recipients of farm subsidies in Britain.

I was surprised and I was shocked.

At that time Britain had no law on freedom of information,

so it was easy for civil servants to refuse my request to release the data.

Five years later, after The UK’s new Freedom of Information Act came into force,

I finally obtained the lists of who gets the money here in the UK.

And it was big news.

A short bike ride from Westminster and I’m here in Eaton Square

the jewel in the crown of a property empire

that makes the Duke of Westminster Britain’s wealthiest citizen

with a net worth of an estimated £7 billion

As well as some of the best bits of London’s real estate

the Duke also owns a farm for which he claims

more than half a million pounds a year in farm subsidies.

With 1,300 dairy cows and thousands of acres of cereals,

you wouldn’t think the Duke of Westminster

was the kind of farmer who needed a taxpayer handout

But that’s exactly how the common agricultural policy works.

The bigger you are, the more land you have, the more money you get.

Time for a bit of history.

Europe’s farm subsidies have deep roots

that go back to the very beginnings of the European Union.

During the Second World War Europe had suffered acute food shortages

and in the years of post war reconstruction

every government was keen to maximise the production of food.

Back in those days many more people lived and worked on the land than they do now

and the founding fathers of the EU came up with a single policy

to meet the twin aims of boosting food production

and ensuring a decent living for the many millions of people who worked on the land.

Their idea was to guarantee high prices for European farmers

and at the same time to use import taxes

to protect European farmers from competition from overseas

from farmers in the United States, Australia and the developing world.

The policy was so successful at increasing production

that by the 1980s the problem was not too little food

but far too much.

The infamous mountains of beef and butter

the wine lakes

and the warehouses full of unwanted grains.

Modern agriculture had become so efficient and so mechanised

that one man could do the work that used to be done by fifty.

The policy had completely failed in its aim of stemming migration

from rural areas into the towns and cities.

And more than that, the costs to taxpayers were spiralling out of control.

And inevitably the political stakes were high.

Farmers feared that their generous subsidies would be removed

and were only too happy to make their voices heard.

By and large, farmers command a lot of public sympathy

particularly those small and family farms

who have a hard time competing with their bigger neighbours.

But would the public feel the same

if they knew the lion’s share of the subsidies

was going to the biggest, most profitable farms?

While I was uncovering the enormous scale of farm subsidies

to rich landowners in the UK

Nils Mulvad, a Danish journalist, was doing exactly the same in his country.

So they from the very beginning said no.

And then we were taking it

into different professional steps

of going up to the higher level

and taking it to the ombudsman

and it was very difficult because

the ombudsman three times said no to look into the case

and the reason for that

was that the authority told us in response

that this data was not in their computer files

so they could not give it to us

and we said that it couldn’t be true

that with so many payments it must be on the computer system

and we requested to get that file

and said we would continue to the end.

They invited us to a meeting and said we could have the data.

We were pretty shocked!

Suddenly they turned around

and it wasn’t necessary to take it to the ombudsman.

After our successes in Denmark and the UK

Nils and I realised it was time to take our work to a European level.

So in May 2005 we went to Brussels, the heart of the EU

where we brought together a handful of people

who shared our interest in uncovering the truth about farm subsidies.

In the four years since then has grown a network of journalists,

researchers, activists and computer programmers

all working together to make the EU budget more transparent.

The network is very loose

and from a journalistic view it’s a new thing.

Normally you don’t want to share your research

with NGOs or people with a political background.

But we decided that we can work together on getting the data,

and everybody can use them for their own purposes.

So we are not binding us to any conclusion or any political view

We are keeping up the independence.

Still it was a bit new

I was a bit scared about

how the rest of the people in the global network

would look at us working together with non-journalists getting the data

but on the other hand it is one of the new ways

of lifting such a big research project

so I thought we should try it.

What got me interested was really the amount of money that’s in it,

This is taxpayers’ money.

At the time I started to work with it

it was the largest single lump of the EU budget.

The data on the recipients of the farm subsidies

have been described by some as a ‘poisonous list’, a ‘dangerous list’,

because there was obviously no interest in disclosing this data

We have had decades of public money being sent to these policies,

and to the farmers and the businesses who implemented these policies

without real public scrutiny.

As well as big companies and wealthy landowners

our investigations have revealed politicians getting farm subsidies.

One of the most memorable cases

was that of the Dutch farms minister, Cees Veerman.

Our investigations revealed that he owned several farms in France

and was claiming hundreds of thousands of euro in subsidies

all of this kept secret from the Dutch people.

As minister for agriculture, he was making decisions on the future of farm subsidies,

decisions that would have a direct bearing on his own financial interests.

On the front cover of the International Herald Tribune today,

on the second day of our meet-up,

is a story about farm subsidies

which we’ve helped to do in a small way I suppose,

and they’ve got pretty good coverage, the whole of page four

as well as this big front page story about it,

so I’m going to go in and try to catch up

with the journalists who wrote it to find out the inside story.

It’s basically a story about multi-nationals

that are moving into Eastern Europe

with weak regulations

and soaking up farm subsidies

These companies are Fortune 500 firms

that make billions of euro a year

and they’re reaping the subsidies

while small farmers are going out of business.

One of the difficult things we’ve found particularly on the farm subsidies

was the lack of transparency,

it was very difficult.

Even now, although there’s much more data online,

It’s almost impossible

to find out how much some companies are getting from the EU taxpayer.

There’s a big debate in Europe about the common agricultural policy

and it’s not a very well informed debate

because most people, if they’re favourable to the common agricultural policy,

assume this money is going to support the rural environment and small farmers.

In fact, the big payments are going to the big players,

and they’re going in some cases to American companies

who are investing in Romania, to introduce factory-farming methods.

They’re doing nothing illegal, it’s completely proper, it’s in tune with the laws,

but I don’t think it’s what most people expect from the common agricultural policy.

I think taxpayers need to make informed choices to know what their money is being spent on.

We’re very lucky because we work for a newspaper that allows us

the time and resources to do this work,

but for most journalists

it’s pretty inconceivable that they’d be able to spend several months on a story,

visit the countries two or three times

and that’s why it’s extremely important

to have as much information available as possible

in an easily accessible a form as possible.

To make the enormous amount of raw data we’d obtained

more easily accessible, and all in one place,

we decided to build a website

that would allow anyone, anywhere,

access to the information at the click of a mouse.

The first farmsubsidy.org website was launched at the end of 2005

and by 2009, there was so much new data

that it needed a complete overhaul.

The biggest challenge in making a website like this work for users

is trying to make the data

easily searchable, really quickly

so that people don’t have to hang around

waiting for the data to load.

There’s so much data that if you have to wait a minute or two

to try and get your search results

then it’s even harder to try and find what you’re looking for.

The things I like about this project are

I like the background philosophy of it,

I like the idea of making data more open and transparent across Europe,

but from a technical perspective it’s a really nice challenge

having to take this much data and make it so fast and so accessible.

We’ve done a couple of other things with the site as well,

allowing people to group the data in particular ways,

so you can make your own list of data

which helps people use the data really nicely

they’re nice challenges to try and solve.

And all the website is open source

so I hope other people will benefit from the techniques I’ve used.

I think it’s what Manuel Castells said a few years ago,

he said ‘Of course the internet is a worry

because it enhances governments’ capacity to monitor citizens,

but the internet is a great opportunity

because it allows citizens capacity to monitor governments’.

When there is given the impression about a policy

that this policy is in order to protect our small farmers

so that they don’t have to leave the countryside and so on,

and then we see that large amounts of money

are sent to wealthy landowners or old nobility families

who have had large lands for generations,

then all of a sudden the political argument

and the reality do not correspond anymore

and that is the place where I, as a journalist, have to come in

and do a story for my readers, for the taxpayers whose money this is.

There are two things I particularly like about farmsubsidy.org.

One is that it shows how the same data can become dramatically more meaningful

if aggregated and made visual and made more meaningful by third parties.

And the second thing is that it does it with European money

and I think there is a dramatic need to do something interesting with European policy.

This can only help European policies and European institutions, Europe-building

Debate is necessary to have more consensus,

to have citizens taking conscience

and taking interest in what is going on at the European level.

At the same time as we were pushing for transparency

using national Freedom of Information laws,

Siim Kallas, the Vice President of the European Commission

was driving forward his own transparency initiative

that would require the publication of recipients of not just farm subsidies,

but all European Union funds.

For me, transparency is very important for democracy.

There is no democracy without transparency

and I discovered

that we have to fight for transparency here,

in the Brussels bubble,

and EU policy is very important.

Database research is very much about crunching numbers and using statistics

and journalists normally come into journalism because they are word people,

they don’t like maths and software and so on,

so it’s really a heavy task when you train journalists

to get them to use these kinds of methods as one of the tools to make research.

We live in the computerised world and we need computer specialists

and it is very helpful if computer specialists

and investigative journalists work together.

This is what we need.

All kinds of stories are cross border now,

climate change, pollution, crime, security.

Politics is also more and more European

so there will be more and more data and stories on a cross border level

and there will be a lot on a European level

that will need to be done on a cross border scale I think.

If we as journalists want to be true watchdogs

if we want to be this counterweight

to the power which is concentrated in the European institutions,

we have to think European as journalists as well.

We have to follow this story across borders

rather than thinking in our own little country and our own little national target group.

The farmsubsidy project opens the door for a broader field of transparency.

Suddenly the institutions come under pressure

to make public how much they spend for their salaries.

The MEPs, how much money do they make?

And this was really something which opened the door for transparency.

I can see all of a sudden people are talking about it.

Ordinary people who don’t know that I’ve been involved in the disclosure of this,

they start talking about the farm subsidies, the policy of the EU,

about the spending, this is what we want.

We want the transparency in order to make the people,

the voters, the basis of democracy

to give them the tool to think about what they want

and to make a qualified vote the next time they vote.

Our work has revealed the truth about who gets what in EU farm subsidies.

But has it really changed anything?

According to Roger Waite, a journalist specialising in EU farm policy, it has.

It’s showing to taxpayers where the money is going

and raising this question of why is it going?

Why do we have farmers

in one member state that get so much

in direct payments,

and farmers in another state who maybe have the same size of land

who get a fraction of the same quantity

in particular we have that with the new member states

and I think that by having the transparency it is driving this political move

to make the distribution of aid much more fair and much more justifiable

and my hope is that through this action,

through the new transparency

aided by farmsubsidy.org

we’re going to see a change in attitude

in a lot of member states about this culture and this idea

that if it is public money it’s only fair that you show the public

how how the money is being spent.

When I first started thinking about how important it was

to be open and honest with the British public about farm subsidies

I had no idea that it would lead to a pan European movement for budget transparency.

But that’s exactly what’s happened.

And now having shone the light on farm policy

we’re beginning to open up budgets that relate to

the subsidies the European Union provides to fishing vessels,

to regional aid, and to overseas aid and development assistance.

‘Follow the money’ is a well known adage among investigative journalists,

but now, thanks to the web,

anyone who’s interested can find out how their money gets spent

and this can only be a good thing

because the more the public knows about what’s going on,

the greater the pressure on politicians to do the right thing.

to find out who gets what from the common agricultural policy visit farmsubsidy.org

and who gets what from the common fisheries policy at fishsubsidy.org

if you want to get involved in the project, we want to hear from you

team@farmsubsidy.org

written and presented by Jack Thurston

A film by Kate Moyse

Original music by Birger Clausen

FarmSubsidy.org is a project of EU Transparency

It is made possible thanks to the generous support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation