Austria is the latest country to have released data on farm subsidy recipients, according to this story in Profil, a leading Austrian magazine. It is a story of princes, barons and fairytale castles gilded with public money.
For more than ten years, the Austrian government has doggedly refused to release data on who gets what from the €1.6 billion spent in Austria on farm subsidies. Until now. The Profil reporters were leaked figures by a 'government source' that go back as far as 1998. The revelations show that it is not the small farmers who get the money but the large aristocratic estates.
Topping the list is Hans Adam II, the Prince of Liechtenstein, who received €1.7 million in 2006. The Prince, whose full name is Johannes Adam Ferdinand Alois Josef Maria Marko d'Aviano Pius von und zu Liechtenstein, owns the LTG banking group and has a personal fortune estimated at more than €2.5 billion. He is said to one of the world's richest heads of state. That he should top the list of CAP beneficiaries in Austria is not without irony: the Prince is not even a citizen of the European Union, whose taxpayers finance his huge handout.
The second placed recipient is Baron Paul Waldbott-Bassenheim, whose estates including the Baroque castle Schloss Halbturn netted him €1.1 million in CAP payments in 2006.
The Church enjoys large subsidies from Brussels. Since the late 1990s, the Heiligenkreuz Abbey received almost €700 000 a year (then almost 10 million Shilling). The Cistercian monastery is joined on the €300 000 and above list by the Austrian company that produces the Red Bull energy drink,which has received six-figure payouts in under the CAP export subsidy schemes.
More details to follow.
Brazil Lula will send those guys to work. The exporters of food and non-food agriculturals subsidized the economies that grew on the post boom. From 1945 to until couple of years ago.
For 1/2 a century the profits in the OECD countries were so much that they could dole out billions of dollars to subsidize their internal producers of food and non-food agriculturals.
Thanks to Brazil, we are sorting this out in the WTO.
Osvaldo Coelho
