test case of the EU's young FOI act (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/oj/2001/l_145/l_14520010531en00430048.pdf) that only had come into effect in December 2001.
Alfter filed the application in June 2004, and the commission finally rejected it the following September. The core reason for the rejection was the definition of a database. According to the commission, only information retrieved through "routine operations" could be released. Another argument was a confidentiality clause for EU member states preventing the commission from revealing the data.
The case is still pending at the level of the European Ombudsman (www.euro-ombudsman.eu.int/home/en/default.htm). Another option for appeals –although at least as time-consuming as an Ombudsman complaint and far more costly – would have been to go to the European Court of Justice.
The next step obviously had to be addressing other member states. In spring 2005, Alfter filed applications in Germany, where two cases currently are pending in administrative courts. The cases challenge German legislation and legal practices containing some of Europe's strongest privacy and business secrecy protections.
British and Dutch journalists and organisations caught interest, too. British media, including London newspapers The Guardian and the Telegraph, published stories exposing Queen Elizabeth II, her son Prince Charles and other nobility among the largest beneficiaries of what is politically presented as support for the struggling farmers.
In the Netherlands, the Evert Vermeer Foundation (www.eucoherence.org/renderer.do/clearState/true/menuId/227658/returnPage/227304), which opposes EU policies that harm developing countries, achieved access to national data in late 2005 after a number of court cases.
Creating Farmsubsidy.org
By May 2005, it was time for a closer network among those interested in transparency, and a handful of people met in Brussels and drafted the idea for the Farmsubsidy.org network, established by Mulvad and British researcher Jack Thurston. It was time to actively include colleagues in other countries, too.
Soon data were released or requested in Sweden, Finland, Poland, Slovenia and a number of other EU member states. When www.farmsubsidy.org went online in late 2005, data of varying quality from a number of EU member states were available, and it became possible to trace subsidies for corporations with subsidiaries in multiple member states.
The heaviest arguments used for rejections all over the EU were privacy, protection of business secrets and the fundamental question of access to information held in databases. However, parts of the European Commission started their own struggle for transparency of the data with the commissioner for public administration, Estonian Siim Kallas, taking the lead. Late last year, after a long struggle with some opposition within the EU, the EU passed a decision declaring that all subsidy data are to be published, beginning in 2009.
Time to lean back and relax at the Farmsubsidy.org network? Not exactly. Particularly in the countries that have resisted transparency most strongly, Network members already can trace movements warning subsidy recipients of the transparency. This easily could lead to a disguise of the true beneficiaries before 2009. Thus, the work continues.
CAR challenges
Work continues on additional information and additional possibilities for the Web site.
Governments provide data in many different formats. Some are uploaded to the Web as PDF files – some, such as Spain's, cover more than 5,000 pages, which are filled with spelling errors. Some countries, such as the Netherlands, only give access to a limited search form, and they try to hinder Web scraping, which makes it very difficult to get a copy of all data for analyzing.
On the other hand, some of the countries are very cooperative and give out data in a standard electronic format (Microsoft Excel or delimited text), which makes it very easy to work with.
Not only the format but also the content varies from country to country. Some countries use the calendar year; others count from the day they open applications for a given program, or they follow the so-called FEOGA year used in the EU budget (an administrative concept similar to a fiscal year in the U.S.).
Unfortunately, the subsidy data is really dirty and changes year after year. For Farmsubsidy.org members, it means trying to create standards and get an overview of the data to understand what to request and what pieces of data are necessary. Mulvad uses his journalism training and CAR experience for scraping, importing and cleaning data. He collaborates with Bob Larkin, a data programmer and project leader who works with MySQL, Drupal (http://drupal.org/about) and PHP.
Preparing for mapping is another major project. The group has geocoded the addresses of subsidy recipients, a process that allows them to be plotted with geographic information system software, and has requested shapefiles of agricultural land that are kept by authorities in each country. This will allow Farmsubsidy.org to geographically display and analyze data about subsidies and other EU statistics.
We also have rated the score of transparency of government authorities according to how much data they give out and the quality of the data. Now we're close to finishing a process on integrating further indices to prepare it for demands for more data. That will facilitate the process of following the money.
The main new thing on the Web site for the coming period will be combining documentation with the transparency index. It will involve uploading new data, including subsidy programs and possibly also the main layout in a multilingual system, making it easier for people who speak languages other than English.
The whole idea is to open opportunities for new types of stories, call it the next wave, in which we look at the aim of the subsidy program and investigate how it actually works in practice. We look into the effects of the schemes that were not taken into consideration, when they were introduced and whether they now might be outdated.
The entire EU farms subsidy system is going to be submitted to a so-called health check this year and next – even more reason to request the data now – instead of waiting until 2009.
See data at www.farmsubsidy.org, for the U.S. data, visit the Environmental Working Group's Web site, www.ewg.org.