What does get more than 1/3 of the total European budget? Agriculture!
Despite the recent drop in the funds given to the fields, from the next year the Old continent's farmers will get about 39% of our money, which makes it one of the two sectors most funded by the Union (the other is the sustainable growth).
The group of activists and journalists behind the cross-country data journalism project farmsubsidy.org, led by Brigitte Alfter and .....
Jack Thurston, will hold a session at the next Friday Data Harvest event.
There they will release new data about subsidies given by the EU to landowners and we (I'm going!) will be able to work on them.
The question is: What is it supposed we can use them for?
Answer: to check how much the farming companies .really get
In fact in the farmsubsidy.org website, it is possible to see the names of the recipients and how much they get. So if you want to see the funds given to Nestlè you can do it. But it would be a useless data if we don't compare it with others, such the other less famous farms listed there.
Or, better, we might stumble on something really interesting in the case we combine those ones to other data, like a list of farms by size or type of agriculture system.
For this reason I have done a list of theme that I will ask to help me to sort out to the programmers at the workshop:
- the amount given to the European big farms and a comparison between these and what the small ones get
Despite we know that the subsidies are based on a certain amount per hectare, I would
like to know who the major European landowners are and how much they get in order
to lay a question: Is it all this fair for the independent landowners?
- the numbers of the financial help given to the farms of each Country, to see how much the ones that have joined the European Union before the 2004 get compared to the ones that have joined later
The two groups get theoretically different amounts, as for the before-2004 one the
system takes into consideration, in addition to the farms' hectares, the historical criteria
and the aid model of the country.
- several comparison between what different farms typologies get:
- growers vs livestock farms (the latter are likely to be less sustainable);
- organic vs traditional (the Eu commission has stressed its intention to be more organic);
- etc..
- Is the landgrapping companies funded by the EU?
find in the list of recipients available at the data harvest the ones that own lands abroad.
The only negative part is represented by the fact that the farmsubsidies website and community have been able to collect just a small part of the information related to the money every farms get. In fact due to new privacy rules the names of the beneficiaries are less than 8%, making the website properly useful for that countries, like Sweden and UK, that have an high transparency index.
The Austrian journalist Hans Weiss took farm subsidy reporting to a new level. He analysed the political power in farmers' unions, connections to political parties, he found farmers under pressure from the dairy companies and neighbours, and he unveiled the enormous power of agricultural Raiffeisen Bank.
Compared to his work my questions look like from a 15 year-old student.
And you? What are you interested on? Any suggestion?
Please feel free to add any issue that you would like to focus on once the data will be released.
