Mick Hartley

The government has provided details of subsidies received under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. The Times provides details:

The scale of handouts from Brussels that line the pockets of some of the country’s richest people, including the Queen and the Prince of Wales, was exposed for the first time yesterday.
The biggest landowners, including members of the Royal Family, a clutch of dukes, and agrifood companies, are able to pick up hefty amounts of cash under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

Tate & Lyle topped the payments league with more than £127 million, while Farmcare Ltd, a subsidiary of the Co-operative Group, received the most in direct farm handouts. The company was paid a total of £2,601,757.

The Queen received £545,897 for farming interests on her Sandringham House and Windsor Castle estates, and the Prince of Wales received £134,938 for his Duchy of Cornwall estate and £90,527 for the Duchy Home Farm on his Highgrove estate.

The Duke of Westminster, ranked second in The Sunday Times Rich List, was also paid £448,472 for his 6,000-acre estate through Grosvenor Farms Ltd.

All the payments were made during the financial year 2003-04 — the most recent for which figures are available. This cash costs the taxpayer £3 billion and adds some £800 a year to the food bill of a family of four.

From the editorial:

It has long been known that the Common Agricultural Policy is an obscene arrangement by which the European Union inflates the incomes of certain farmers through direct payments or financial support for “environmental improvements” and “rural services”. The overall sum of this grotesque subsidy, currently about £3 billion in Britain and about ten times that figure across the EU, has been in the public realm for decades. What was not appreciated, until now, was how much went to which individuals and institutions.

The figures that we report today are truly shocking. They dispel any lingering sentiment that the CAP might have its faults but that it at least keeps those who till the soil in Emmerdale in business. The real beneficiaries are instead large agribusinesses, companies such as Tate & Lyle and a small collection of extremely wealthy landowners. In crude terms, this is a structure by which Europe’s poor transfer money to Europe’s rich at the expense of both themselves and Africa’s impoverished.