By Nenad Radicevic

After joining the European Union, Serbia can expect a billion euros per year for its agriculture, said Vice Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic. This aim could be too optimistic having in mind that Serbia has a lot of small farmers with modest farm income, while Poland, which is several times bigger country, got almost two billion euros this year, on its way to double average farm revenue from 2004 to 2009. However, the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) is one of the most questionable EU common policies. Problematic aspects of the CAP, such as a lack of transparency and poor usability of information related to beneficiaries of EU funding, are recently underlined by the research of an independent think-tank.

Multinational companies and royal landowners were among the biggest beneficiaries of the EU`s 55 billion farm euros aid budget in 2008.

Of the big individual payments, some around 100 million euros, Italian companies took five of the top six places, reads the study by Farmsubsidy.org, which is a cross-border network of investigative journalists, researchers and campaigners pushing for more transparency in the EU`s Common Agricultural Policy.

Italian sugar group Italia Zuccheri received 139.8 million euros, its rival Eridania Sadam 125.3 million euros, while banking group Banca Popolare Italiana, which has agriculture assets, was paid 96 million euros. Irish farm group Greencore received a CAP payment of 83.4 million euros.

Some 180 firms in Italy, 165 in Spain, 142 in France, 47 in the Netherlands, 38 in Portugal, 22 in Belgium, 21 in the UK and 12 in both Bulgaria and Romania received more than a million euros.

However, France is the top overall beneficiary of the CAP, with 10.4 billion euros which is almost one fifth out of the total CAP budget. The Doux Group, which sells chicken products worldwide, was the biggest single recipient in France, with payment of 62.8 million euros and the seventh place in the overall millionaire ranking. Major food companies Nestle and Tate & Lyle were the largest UK recipients on around 1 million euros each.

British and Spanish aristocrats, who own huge farms, also got significant amounts from EU treasury. The Queen Elizabeth II received a CAP payment of around 530,000 euros for her farm at Sandringham, the Duke of Westminster got 540,000 euros, while Prince Charles took 180,000 euros.

Large payments for CAP beneficiaries are not a problem, but highly-fragmented information provided by governments on recipients of EU agricultural funding. This practice actively confronts the principles of open government and transparency as well as the European Commission`s transparency rules that oblige governments to disclose information on farm funds recipients, their municipalities and the amounts received.

Despite EU member states had until 30 April to publish information on the beneficiaries of farm subsidies for 2008, the study found that only eight countries - Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Romania, Slovenia and the United Kingdom - had fully complied with the regulations.

According to researchers` findings, ten EU members - Ireland, Lithuania, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Cyprus, Spain, Slovakia and Bulgaria - are classified as "clearly in breach of the regulations", further eight states - France, Greece, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Sweden - as "likely to be in breach", while Germany simply refused to publish any data on its farm subsidiary recipients, arguing that it had legal constraints due to data protection laws in local districts.

The European Commission has refused to give Berlin an extension and has said it would start infringement procedures against Germany if it does not publish its list of beneficiaries.

"All 27 agreed on [the rules] and took this obligation... You take an obligation, you have to stick to it. It is that simple," said Kristian Schmidt, deputy head of cabinet for Administration and Anti-Fraud Commissioner Siim Kallas.

He placed the blame directly at the feet of governments, but admitted that language difficulties often present an obstacle to meaningful data collation.

Jana Mittermaier, head with EU office of Transparency International, rejected Schmidt`s claim that comparative analysis is difficult to conduct, underlining that eighty per cent of EU funds are spent under shared mechanisms with member states, and governments are responsible for reporting such cases.

"The system is fragmented and decentralised, but surely there must be the capacity to compile comparative data. What farmsubsidy.org is doing should be done by the Commission. I don`t fully buy the argument that it should be left to member states," said Mittermaier.

Still, there are a number of rules violations which are not a result of language difficulties. For example, Poland has published only the names of people applying for CAP subsidiary but not the names of the companies they represent.

"That is a crazy way to do it," said researcher Nils Mulvad, as it camouflages the identities of the companies or other legal entities that are really applied, "making it impossible to compile datasets for large recipients, like one country filing applications for several departments signed by several staff members".

On the other side, the Netherlands didn`t provide a total amount for each recipient, while Farmsubsidy.org cited Hungary, Ireland and the Netherlands as being among a number of countries "engaging in apparent deliberate obfuscation of their websites," underlining that Hungary had presented its data in a "totally unstructured" PDF document of more than 13,000 pages.

Full data from only 18 member states had been taken into account at this stage of the analysis which shows that the 707 millionaires received up to 10 percent of the total amount of the CAP in 2008.

The funding distribution always causes fresh complaints by small farmers who claim that subsidies are divided unfairly, adding that "everyone has known for a long time that there is no link between incomes and subsidies, which results in an unjust system." In spite of that, CAP subsidies in Eastern Europe helped thousands of small farmers to buy new equipment and boost income.

Nevertheless, the EU`s Common Agriculture Policy has long been a magnet for criticism for wasting money and killing competition from developing countries. Even EU officials recognised the need for improving this policy, so the CAP is currently being re-modelled to help create new types of rural jobs and to serve environmental goals. The importance of the CAP reform, besides, lies in the fact that the annual CAP budget is 55 billion euros, which is 43 per cent of the EU budget.