Unleashing the power of investigative journalism

Eight years – and a lifetime – ago, I was working as a political aide to the UK agriculture minister Nick Brown. It was a difficult time for British farming. Prices were down, the backwash of mad cow disease was impacting the livestock sector, the strong pound was hitting exporters and there was genuine discontent in many rural communities. At the same time, the member states of the European Union were negotiating a reform of the common agricultural policy (CAP), the collective name for all the support programmes that exist to give a helping hand to European farmers. At a time of crisis, farmers said, why tinker with the government support programmes that are our lifeline?

We were having real difficulties getting across our argument that an unreformed CAP was part of the problem, not the solution. Economic studies told us that most farm subsidies went to a small number of large farm businesses, and that the principal effect of production-linked support was to increase land values, rents and input costs. This was making it much harder for new entrants to get into farming, for successful, entrepreneurial farmers to grow their businesses and for farmers to respond to changing customer preferences. The inequality and the waste were neither registering with most farmers nor with the public at large. People still thought that the CAP was a policy giving a helping hand to small family farms, the backbone of rural Europe.

One rainy afternoon, and in part out of pure curiosity, we asked the top civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture to produce a list of the 20 biggest recipients of farm subsidies in the UK, and how much each one got. It read like a page out of Burke’s Peerage. If the public knew about the six and seven figure annual payouts to the likes of the Duke of Westminster and the Earl of Buccleuch and big food companies like Nestle and Tate & Lyle, would they see things the same way? Unfortunately, British laws at that time prevented disclosure of this information, but once I had left the government I decided to push for disclosure. It was not until 2005, with a new EU directive on public access to environmental information and the UK’s own Freedom of Information Act, that the data was finally released.

This was several months after two Danish journalists, Nils Mulvad and Kjeld Hansen, acting quite separately from me, had teased the data out of an equally reluctant Danish Ministry of Agriculture. Since then the campaign has snowballed across Europe. Sometimes the effort has been led by investigative journalists, sometimes by campaigning NGOs and academic researchers. Cross-border collaboration has evolved into the farmsubsidy.org project, and there is now an online database so that anyone with an internet connection can access the data, in a user-friendly way. There are now 19 countries that have revealed full or partial data on farm subsidy recipients and last December all EU countries signed up to transparency in EU budget payments starting this year.

Good investigative journalism is key to making sense of the data. Without the local knowledge and the inquiring minds, all we would have is raw numbers. It is journalists who turn the information into stories which people can relate to - thereby making government more accountable to those who foot the bill, i.e. taxpayers. It is one thing to get a few headlines about how much EU subsidy goes to Queen Elizabeth II or to Albert Prince of Monaco, but this does not really shed light on the inner workings of the policy. By contrast, last year The Observer newspaper ran a feature article on how European dairy export subsidies are destabilising developing country dairy markets that included a detailed analysis of who got the money and where the surplus EU milk and butter was being dumped. This helped bring into sharp relief a small but scandalous aspect of the CAP. Fortunately the EU has just suspended export subsidies in the dairy sector, but there is a need to continue pushing for greater transparency elsewhere. The EU currently pays farmers to destroy perfectly good fruit and vegetables when there is a bumper crop that might lower prices. It also pays Greek farmers to grow tobacco and finances refining low-grade wine into industrial alcohol. Is this something Europeans are happy to pay for with their taxes?

With the Doha Round of World Trade Organisation trade negotiations going nowhere, many developing countries are looking to the possibility of dispute settlement to bring rich countries’ farm support policies into line with their existing WTO commitments. But most developed countries are several years late in notifying their farm subsidies to the WTO. This makes it much harder for developing countries to prepare litigation. When Brazil brought its landmark case against US cotton subsidies, it drew not on WTO notifications but on data obtained by the Washington DC-based Environmental Working Group using freedom of information laws.

Meanwhile, the worldwide rush towards biofuels is being driven by a new raft of government subsidy programmes. Are these the most cost-effective way of cutting greenhouse gas emissions? Only with fully transparent policies will voters have a chance to decide whether biofuels are a solution to the problem of global warming or just another way for big agribusinesses to boost profits at the public’s expense.

Ultimately one must return to the insight that at the heart of every subsidy there is a ‘social contract’ defining the public benefit that justifies the transfer. Sometimes the contract is clearly specified, sometimes it is implicit. Without transparency it is hard to know if the subsidy is providing value for public money. When journalists and other researchers go beyond the headline-grabbing rich lists and stories of ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ transparency can reconnect citizens with their government and leads to a more healthy and responsive public life.