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In the midst of negotiations at the WTO Ministerial in Hong Kong on December 14, the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) held a breakfast meeting and discussion with NGO members, key stakeholders, and the media on one of the pivotal issues of the conference — agriculture support levels. Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and GMF Transatlantic Fellow Jack Thurston presented the background and results of their separate, complimentary projects on increased transparency of U.S. and EU agricultural payments, respectively.
 
Mr. Cook's project is run as a part of his work at EWG, with a website revealing who receives U.S. government farm payments and the level of compensation. With a search capacity on several factors, including recipient name, congressional district, and commodity grown, the website reveals some of the current tensions within the U.S. farm support program, including the fact that only 5 percent of congressional districts receive 50 percent of all the federal subsidies. Contradicting the claims by opponents to farm subsidy reform, many of those recipients are large businesses and wealthy individuals, instead of small family farms.

With ten years of information available on his website, Mr. Cook stressed how this data may help spur calls for greater transparency of payments records, and subsequently, more calls for reform of the U.S. farm regime itself. "We can't make the case for reform, without building support back home," he noted. With the U.S. Farm Bill set to be reauthorized in 2007, his website and its data will be crucial to the debate on reform.
 
Jack Thurston then presented his work on the farm support transparency in Europe. He is a founding member of Farmsubsidy.org, a pan-European group with the aim of showing who receives payments under the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Unlike the United States, the progress in Europe has been slower, because out of the 25 EU member states, only the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden have fully disclosed their farm payment records.  Yet, the situation is similar to that across the Atlantic, in that the distribution of revealed subsidies can be uneven and not reflective of the amount paid in by each country to the CAP: 80 percent of the payments go to only 20 percent of European farms, and over 5 million farms receive less than €1250 a year. In fact, and all 10 new EU members pay in more to the CAP than they receive.

Mr. Thurston's efforts have been aided by increased freedom of information in Europe, and accordingly, with more countries' cooperation, more analysis of subsidy reform can be completed. In turn, those who look to lose out from CAP reform have responded vociferously, and will most likely continue to do so as more data becomes available.
 
After both presentations, a lengthy and engrossing discussion ensued, illustrating the impact and importance of the work of both Mr. Cook and Mr. Thurston. As the Doha Round continues into 2006, GMF will continue to support this work, and to convene stakeholders in the agriculture debate within the Round.