Farmers unfairly maligned
The European Court of Auditors has helped them, by tarring all with the same brush.
And the consequences could be severe for farmers. Already, there has been some anti-farmer sentiment across Europe, after the Court announced that more than €3bn of “irregular” Common Agricultural Policy payments went missing since 1971.
In Brussels, the decision of the Court to rake over CAP irregularities going back 33 years is being willingly interpreted in some quarters as another setback for the agriculture policy, which eats up half of the EU’s budget.
Commentators are pointing out that the EU now has other areas at least as important as agriculture and deserving of their own policies. They say the Lisbon Strategy is at least as important, bidding as it does to make the EU the world’s most dynamic and competitive economy.
The €3.1bn missing from the CAP is also seen as money that could have been well spent on enlargement of the EU to 10 new countries.
The announcement of huge losses of public money has swelled the ranks of the CAP’s enemies, only too ready to tell EU taxpayers how many million euro they contributed for non-existent olive trees in Italy and Greece, which national governments or the Commission were apparently unable to count.
The European Court of Auditors admitted that no system will achieve 100% recovery of irregular payments.
But it would have done well to more closely pinpoint where things go wrong in the Common Agriculture Policy.
It is farmers who will suffer, as opponents of the CAP seize on the court’s findings, but it was not farmers who were at fault.
It was national authorities in Spain who failed to fine companies illegally claiming olive oil consumption aid.
It was Greek and German civil servants who couldn’t control premiums paid for cereals and oilseeds, and who illegally retained aids to cover their administrative costs, and didn’t carry out checks on farms.
It was Italian officials who failed to verify that all crops grown on set-aside land were sent to non-food uses.
It was the Greek government which was found seriously deficient in administering fruit and vegetable producer groups.
They undid the good work of countries which operated the CAP well and recovered most of the public money which went astray; as it inevitably will in any bureaucracy handling more than €40 billion annually.
From 1971 to 2002, Denmark, Finland, Ireland and the Netherlands recovered more than half of their relatively small irregular CAP payments.
It is Italy which dragged the CAP in the mire, accounting for €1.7bn of the €3bn which the Court of Auditors revealed, and recovering only 10% of it.
Germany and Spain clocked up another €667m of irregular CAP payments, and recovered only 10 to 13%.
If the money which has gone missing in Italy was excluded, Brussels would be looking to recover only 0.5% of CAP funding.
If businesses which claimed export refunds were better controlled, and payments to fruit and vegetable producers in the Mediterranean countries better monitored, there would be no CAP financial scandal.
These are the areas where Brussels must clamp down on, if the EU is serious about its fight against corruption being one of its highest political priorities.
