European Union she admitted generously subsidiesagricultural companies of several billionaires in 2018-2021. The 17 “ultimate beneficiaries” who made the 2022 Forbes Rich List include Andrej Babišformer Czech prime minister who was acquitted of agricultural subsidy fraud charges in February; James Dysonthe British vacuum cleaner tycoon who argued that Britain should leave the EU and whose company received pre-Brexit payments; and Guangchang Guo, a Chinese investor who owns the Wolverhampton Wanderers football club, according to The Guardian.
Farmers struggle to survive, billionaires benefit
Other billionaires benefiting from EU taxpayer funds include Clemens Tönnies, the German meat magnate who admitted he was “wrong” about Vladimir Putin in 2022; Anders Holch Povlsen, Danish rewilding enthusiast and private landowner in the UK; and Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, Danish toymaker and former CEO of Lego.
“This is madness,” commented Benoît Biteau, a French organic farmer and Green MEP in the last European Parliament. “The vast majority of farmers are struggling to survive.” The EU devotes one third of its total budget to farmers under common agricultural policy (CAP), which provides money based on the area of land owned by the farmer, and not on whether he needs support.
Who receives CAP subsidies?
Strict privacy laws, weak transparency requirements and complex company ownership chains mean there is no way to know who is receiving the money. In a study commissioned by the European Parliament’s 2021 Committee on Budgetary Control, researchers from the Center for European Policy Studies found that it is “currently de facto impossible” to identify the biggest ultimate beneficiaries of EU funds with full certainty.
However, the researchers linked data on agricultural subsidy recipients from each Member State to a commercial database of companies. They identified people who owned at least 25% of the company at each stage of the ownership chain to reveal the “ultimate beneficiaries.”
As many as 17 billionaires received EU agricultural subsidies through companies they owned in whole or in part over four years. The total amount of money linked to billionaires was 3.3 billion euros.
Subsidies for breeding
Estimates suggest that 50%-80% of EU agricultural subsidies go to animal husbandry rather than food that would be better for the health of people and the planet. “We need a rapid food transformation for a healthier future, and subsidies are the biggest economic lever for change,” said Paul Behrens, a global change researcher at Leiden University. He added that “the richest landowners continue to get richer thanks to subsidies.”
