EU farm money lands on U.K. gentry

[Menydh]

EU farm money lands on U.K. gentry

The Herald Tribune
April 12, 2005

When Britain's new freedom of information law took effect on Jan. 1, a small group of activists, from groups like Oxfam, Friends of the Earth and a couple of newspapers submitted a question they had long wanted to ask: Who gets what subsidies from the European Union's common agricultural policy?

At first, the government in London refused to say, swayed in part by the throaty opposition of the Country Land and Business Association. But on March 22, it capitulated and mailed out a nondescript CD-ROM containing a list of 100,000 names.

The list showed it was not small farmers who necessarily benefited most from Brussels' largess but big agribusiness companies and - since this was England - the landed aristocracy and royals, including Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles, and a castleful of dukes and earls.

The dispute that has raged since then has struck at the heart of Britain's preoccupation with class and added to the current clash between urban and rural values, already inflamed by this year's government ban on fox hunting.

What should modern Europe's countryside be used for, and who says so?

The new discussion has also put a fresh focus on the dwindling number of small farmers in Europe and, since most of the rest of Europe does not yet have the same openness to sharing public sector data, has added to the stirrings of a Continent-wide push to reveal who else is receiving what from Brussels.

"What are we getting for our money?" said Jack Thurston of the Foreign Policy Center, a former political adviser to the government and one of the leading campaigners for increased transparency. "It is public money, but is it doing something that is valued by the public?"

Topping the British list of EU farm aid recipients was Tate & Lyle, the sugar company, which received nearly £120 million, or $227 million, last year, according to the Rural Payments Agency. Nestle UK received £11.6 million.

Such corporate subsidy was irritating enough for Britain's generally urban and left-of-center press. It appeared to illustrate what it had suspected all along, that it was those farmers cultivating England's counties on an industrial scale who monopolized the money from Brussels.

The deepest scorn was reserved for the payouts to the upper classes. The Duke of Westminster, owner of swathes of prime real estate in central London, got £448,472.

The Duke of Marlborough, scion of the Churchill family and Blenheim Palace heir, received £511,435. Other benefactors, according to Oxfam and the press, which went through the data, were the Duke of Bedford, the Earl of Plymouth, the Marquess of Cholmondeley and the Earl of Radnor.

Meanwhile, the queen was paid around £546,000 to help run her estates at Sandringham in Norfolk and Windsor Castle.

Prince Charles, whose wealth was on display at his Windsor wedding on Saturday, received £224,000 in extra help for his farm work.

The Scottish and Welsh authorities, fearing legal action for publishing private information, have so far spared their farmers. But the Duke of Buccleuch, possibly Britain's largest private landowner who calls a large part of Scotland his own, presumably anticipated the PR backlash and, according to The Sunday Times, acknowledged that he had received around £700,000 from Brussels in 2004.

Britons may be excused for thinking they had slipped back in time a few centuries. The list "read like a roll call from Debrett's," opined The Guardian. To put it bluntly, said Penny Fowler, who ran Oxfam's campaign, of Britain's total annual subsidy of nearly €4 billion, "small-scale farmers didn't get much at all."

The activists who triggered the outbreak of openness were emulating a U.S. campaign, which, according to Liz Moore of the Washington-based Environmental Working Group, in 2001 forced the revelation that U.S. government subsidies were being paid to thousands of dead American farmers, as well as to celebrities and businessmen, and even to a basketball star.

The United States is now considering a tighter ceiling on the amount that any single person is eligible to receive in one year.

In Europe, Denmark was the first to go down the openness route. Last year, following a campaign by two journalists, figures were released that showed that Brussels money had gone to members of the Danish royal family, big companies, state prisons, and politicians, according to Nils Mulvad, one of the journalists. "We now have concrete information on how this system actually functions," he said.

The campaigners want other countries to open up.

The powerful battalions of German and French farmers may, however, prove more successful than the British and the Danes in keeping the size of their paychecks secret.

Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU agriculture commissioner, said that she personally favored full transparency but that national capitals must decide. Last month, however, Siim Kallas, the EU's new administration commissioner, declared an initiative to close the "information gap."

In the meantime, the influence of urban mores is already having an effect on subsidies.

From this year, parts of Europe's farm payments have been "decoupled" from production and tied instead to environmental conditions.

Farmers will still get roughly the same amount of money, but instead of producing mountains of food to qualify for subsidy, they must deliver clean rivers and flowering hedgerows, the kind of public goods that today's overwhelmingly urban majority - even among England's rural population, only about 1.2 percent now work in agriculture - wants to enjoy in its countryside.

For extra income, European farmers must look to the open market and, according to Stefan Tangermann, director for agriculture at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, to value-added products - Europe's wonderful cheeses and its world-famous wines, which should be able to command a healthy world market - rather than the nondescript bulk produce they have concentrated on in past decades.

The new transparency, by showing how little Brussels actually gives to small-scale farmers, may ensure continued public sympathy, and financial support, for the hardy sons and daughters of Europe's soil in their new incarnations as cheesemakers, vintners and environmental stewards of the land.

But it could also be the final straw that leads to public disillusionment with farming in general and the turning off of subsidies, a step that would lead to another shakeout in an industry that has already shaken out a lot over the last few years.

According to England's National Farmers' Union, in figures published last year, English farming incomes fell by nearly two-thirds between 1996 and 2002, and about 65,000 people left the industry.

Tangermann said that, across the whole of Europe, large farms were still "doing very well indeed."

The incomes of the smallest-scale farms were buoyant, but only because they increasingly bolstered their wages by looking outside agriculture. It is medium-scale farms that were "gradually disappearing" from the landscape, he said.

Their position will become even more tenuous if the European public looks too closely at the figures that have been revealed by the new openness campaigners, like Thurston and Mulvad, and decides it does not like what it sees.

"The increased transparency that we now have," said Tangermann, "might indeed lead people to ask whether all that money is sufficiently well targeted to good public purpose."


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