Each year, the European Union pays more than $100 million to subsidize Arla, the seventh largest dairy corporation in the world. In the accounting year 2004, the sum of the subsidies was larger than the profit declared by the Danish-Swedish corporation.
During World Trade Organization negotiations in December 2005, the EU promised to abolish the export subsidies that provide the largest part of Arla's bounty. The consequence, according to the company's deputy director when confronted with the subsidy figures, would be a restructuring, including moving jobs from Denmark and Sweden to a number of lower-cost countries.
This straightforward business story targeted a Danish audience, but more European journalists now are starting to report in their own language on EU subsidy programs after decades of silence. Almost half of the EU's annual budget is allocated to farm subsidies. In 2007, the amount is €54.9 billion, or $71.2 billion. Yet, until recently, who gets the money has been entirely secret.
Farmsubsidy.org is the driving force in bringing Europe's farm subsidies into the light. This network organization uses Freedom of Information laws and computer-assisted reporting to gather and distribute subsidy data from EU nations. The work to get complete data on the subsidies is vast and far from done, but the potential in the data already gathered is huge. As a result of