The largest beneficiary of farm subsidies in Denmark got more than one million euro (DKK 7,9 million) for 2010 from Brussels. Newly released figures illustrate an established pattern.

The five owners of the estate Kjargaarden in Jutland last year won the unofficial price of being top scorer of paid out subsidies from the EU, receiving a bit more than € 1 000 000.
The Kjargaarden farm was followed by well-known estates such as Bregentved in Zealand (€ 800 000) and Frijsenborg & Wedellsborg (€ 630 000) in Jutland. Members of the Danish nobility own the two latter estates.
This is hardly astonishing and practically by the book. These subsidies know as Single Payments are paid according to size of the farm and its historical level of production.
Large farms get large subsidies.

Compared to 2009 the Danish top scorers are the same, only their relative positions have changed in the ”subsidy league”.
As for 2009 the 100 Danish top scorers last year together received more than a quarter of a billion Danish kronor (€ 33 million), for names and figures see excel-file to the right.
The perhaps most interesting aspect is the fact that these figures and the names behind them can be told, as an official disclosure was decided to be against EU-law by the European Court of Justice in November last year.

But the Danish authorities as well as the Finnish and Swedish have taken the position that the verdict of the Court has no influence on the national laws of access to documents.
Names and figures of subsidy receivers are thus released when requested, but not actively promoted on the authorities’ own web sites.
How the EU as an entity should react to the verdict of the Court last year is yet to be decided.
Meanwhile different member states have taken different approaches, with the three Nordic countries sticking to transparency.
 

Staffan Dahllöf