EU to open the cheque book
For example, you may be interested to find out that the Northern Ireland division of the Co Cavan based Lakeland Dairies got €5,442,316 in export subsidies in 2004.
No great secret about that; the figure is probably in their annual report, but if you know any farmers north of the border, you can go to the www.Farmsubsidy.org website to see how big a Single Farm Payment cheque dropped in their front door this year.
The names of southern Irish farmers, and how much they get, are not yet available to the general public.
But journalists and activists have used Freedom of Information requests to get partial or full information from Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Latvia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Britain.
Not surprisingly, there is resistance in some member states. They have been refused access to records in Austria, Finland, Germany, Greece and Poland.
And for one reason or another, no data is available from the following countries: Cyprus, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, or Slovakia.
Farmsubsidy.org notes how the Irish Independent named the top 20 recipients of EU farm subsidies in Ireland last year, after a Freedom of Information request to the Department of Agriculture and Food.
It may be only a matter of time before a full list of what every Irish farmer gets from the EU is available, because the European Commission now wants every Member State to annually publish the list of all those who receive funds under policies managed jointly by the Commission and Member States.
That would include all spending under the CAP on direct payments, market measures and rural development.
However, strong resistance is likely here in Ireland, where even league tables based on secondary school exam results have caused an almighty fuss — with Education Minister Mary Hanafin apparently so firmly opposed that Fine Gael have alleged it could cause a split in the Government.
Compared to that, letting the world know how much your income is subsidised by EU taxpayers is a much more sensitive issue.
But don’t worry, says EU Commissioner for Agriculture Mariann Fischer Boel, “statistics can be the servant of genuine transparency” if — she says — we clearly explain their context to the public. Explaining why a farmer or a food processor gets so much money from Brussels is a tall order for the EU, an institution reckoned to be one of the worst in the world for explaining its activities to the public.
That’s why Irish farmers are entitled to worry about their financial affairs being thrown open to the public.
Fischer Boel herself admits that the public are badly informed about farm subsidies.
She says some people think the Single Payment money (which will account for nearly 90% of direct payments to EU farmers by 2011) disappears into a black hole.
“No, it doesn’t”, protests the Agriculture Commissioner.
“It pays our farmers for the public goods that we expect from them: clean air and water, an attractive countryside, a high level of food safety”.
Try telling that to an urban dweller who can’t afford to get to the countryside, and can only buy cheap processed food, someone who may, according to Fischer Boel, view the CAP as an expensive engine of over-production which lays waste to the countryside.
There are many other shortcomings to publishing the figure on the annual cheque a farmer gets from the EU.
There’s no indication of how large a proportion of the farmer’s income that cheque is.
For many Irish farmers, income is much less than the aid received from the EU (because farming costs eat into the subsidy); but that won’t be revealed in the statistics.
Nor will the list show how many family members or agricultural workers depend on the cheque.
“European citizens have a right to know what we are spending their money on”, says Fischer Boel. “If we appear to be hiding things from the public, then the public will think we have something to hide.”
“It is much more difficult to convince our citizens that we are spending their money well, if we are shy about saying who receives that money. It is not through secrecy that we will best make the case for the CAP.”
No-one can dispute that.
But it looks like the Eurocrats are biting off more than they can chew when Fischer Boel says, “Telling the public about who gets how much money is only half of the story. The other half is explaining what the money is for.”
