Posts Tagged Common Fisheries Policy

€ 578 million a year is “a sort of money” – as we would say in Denmark. This is what the European Union grants to the Common European Fisheries Policies, the CFP.  Spain and Poland are by far the largest recipient nations according to Commission statistics. But who actually gets the money? Who are the companies and fishermen, who carry out our common policy? And what are the projects, they spend the money on?

The fight to get access to information about the fishsubsidy beneficiaries is described in a new analysis that I made for the British non-profit EU Transparency. Unfortunately my conclusion is that transparency is having a bad time when it comes to fisheries.

Journalists and activists had figured out the information for previous years by project, place, vessel. Through freedom of information requests they had gotten out this type of information from the late nineties until 2006, 15 bits of information on each payment. However for that period one important piece of information was lacking: The name of the company or person, who actually got the money.

This was solved through the European Transparency Initiative initiated by Siim Kallas, vice-president of the European Commission.  He broke the spell of so-called business secrets and so-called protection of privacy when it comes to administrating European money. Now it is obligatory for the member states to publish the recipients.

Unfortunately the transparency push is hampered by the fact, that not only the responsibility for the data themselves lies with the member states, but also the duty to publish them.

The responsibility for the data themselves is clearly with the member states – they administrate and distribute the money and have to account for that. However the responsibility for publishing the data without giving clear guidelines on how they should be published actually worsens the situation. The European citizen, activist, politician, journalist, academic who wants to get an impression about who gets what, is left with a jumble of different formats, lacking information and other obstacles.

Given the fact, that journalists, activists, academics, politicians are a breed, that usually does not give up before information is out, it would now be worthwhile to save everybody’s time and lift the transparency initiative from the principal level (that Siim Kallas achieved) to the operational level.

This type of basic information as to who receives the European money and what they use it for should be made public in a user-friendly format on European level. It would save enormous amounts of time and effort for those, who seek the information as well as for the officials, who through freedom of information legislation are obliged to grant it.