Europe’s Farm Money Flows Uphill

In the Netherlands the top one percent of farm subsidy recipients collect 40 percent of the money. In Denmark the top one percent take 18 percent and the top ten percent take 61 percent. Across six countries, the top ten percent receive about two thirds of everything paid out.

Those figures come from an analysis of 2024 payments published by Greenpeace in January 2026, carried out by the data analysts Kaas & Mulvad. Greenpeace is a campaigning organisation and its title, “welfare for the rich”, is a verdict. The numbers underneath come from national databases. The European Parliament’s own research service tells a related story with different numbers, and the gap between the two says something about how hard it is to count who gets what.

The story matters because the money is not small and the rules are being rewritten right now. The EU is negotiating its 2028 to 2034 budget, and the question of whether a single farm can keep collecting hundreds of thousands of euros a year is one of the sharpest fights inside it.

A third of the budget, and who gets it

The Common Agricultural Policy takes roughly a third of the EU budget. The Greenpeace analysis covers six countries and includes EU payments plus national co-financing in the financial year to 15 October 2024.

The share of subsidies going to the top one and top ten percent of recipients:

• Czechia: 23 and 69 percent
• Denmark: 18 and 61 percent
• Germany: 24 and 59 percent
• Italy: 31 and 69 percent
• Netherlands: 40 and 59 percent
• Spain: 28 and 62 percent

The top twenty percent take about four fifths. The bottom half of recipients fight over the crumbs.

Read the table twice. Denmark has the lowest top-one-percent share of the six, yet its top ten percent still collect 61 percent. Italy and Czechia are the most top-heavy at the ten percent line. The Netherlands is the odd one: a handful of recipients take an enormous slice, while the rest of the top ten percent take relatively little. Different countries, different shapes of the same pyramid.

Names in the ledger

Some of the largest individual payments are public. The Agrofert Group, linked to the Czech politician Andrej Babiš, received 16.6 million euros in 2024. Italy’s largest landowner, Bonifiche Ferraresi, appears among the biggest recipients. In Denmark, the Moltke family is on the list.

Read also: Brussels Prices Border Drones but Not Rights Monitors

Greenpeace calculates that the 16.6 million euros paid to Agrofert could fund water-efficiency support for up to 7,703 small farms, using average cost estimates from the Institute for European Environmental Policy. Take the comparison as an illustration of scale, since the payments serve different purposes.

Agrofert has a longer history with Brussels than the 2024 ledger shows. A Commission audit found a conflict of interest involving Babiš and the group, concluding that EU structural and investment funds had been unduly granted, with Babiš named as the beneficial owner through the trusts AB Private Trust I and II.

On 9 June 2021 the European Parliament adopted a resolution confirming that finding, by 505 votes to 30 with 55 abstentions. It asked for illegally received subsidies to be repaid, for the end beneficiaries of CAP money to be made public, and for large payments to natural persons to be banned.

One caution belongs with that history: the audit concerned structural funds, a different pot from CAP direct payments, so it does not show that the 2024 farm payments were improper. What the episode shows is narrower and more durable: Parliament has already asked, in a vote that was not close, for exactly the transparency that the beneficiary lists now partly provide.

The Parliament’s numbers

A European Parliament research briefing from July 2026 measures something narrower: hectare-based direct payments. It finds that about 20 percent of EU farms receive about 80 percent of those payments, a split that has barely moved since decoupled payments began in 2005.

The top 20 percent of recipients also hold about 80 percent of the land. In Slovakia, Czechia, Estonia, Latvia and Romania the top 20 percent get more than 85 percent. In the Netherlands, France and Luxembourg they get under 55 percent.

The Netherlands looks very different in the two datasets. The likely reason is scope: Greenpeace counts all CAP-related subsidies and co-financing for each recipient, the Parliament briefing looks at hectare-based direct payments only. Anyone quoting a concentration figure should say which one they mean.

Who is a farmer anyway?

Eurostat counted about 9.1 million farms in the EU in 2020. Family farms account for roughly 93 percent of them, yet farms run as companies or other non-family structures manage something like 39 percent of the agricultural land. That mismatch is the quiet driver of the whole debate. A scheme sold to voters as support for the family farm increasingly pays by the hectare to whoever controls the hectares, and a large share of hectares now sits in corporate hands.

It also explains why the arguments talk past each other. A farm lobbyist pictures a family with 200 hectares and a mortgage on the machinery. A campaigner pictures a holding company with a political owner and a lawyer who knows how to structure ownership. Both exist. The data does not say which one dominates your national top ten, because the lists name legal entities, not people.

Why the money flows uphill

The mechanism is mostly area. Direct payments follow the hectare, so whoever farms the most land receives the most money. Concentration of subsidies mirrors concentration of land. A defender of the system will say that large farms feed the continent, that payments stabilise incomes in a risky trade and that a hectare is a hectare whoever owns it.

Read also: Brussels Sees Progress, Watchdogs Count Almost None

A critic will answer that a payment scheme designed in the name of family farming now rewards size. And the current rules let member states ignore the problem. Capping payments above 100,000 euros is optional, and so is cutting payments above 60,000 euros. Four countries apply only capping, two only degressivity and five both, according to the Parliament briefing, and the planned savings are mostly under one percent of direct payments.

Large farms also have real economic arguments on their side. Bigger operations often carry bigger costs, bigger loans and more employees, and a hard cap can feel harsher to a farm that employs dozens of people than to a landowner who rents the work out. Whether the design of a cap treats those cases fairly depends on its wording, and the wording is what the negotiators are now fighting over.

The fight over the next budget

The Commission published its proposal for 2028 to 2034 on 17 July 2025. It would make capping and degressivity mandatory for the new basic payment: cuts of 25 percent for amounts between 20,000 and 50,000 euros, 50 percent between 50,000 and 75,000 and 75 percent above that, with a hard cap of 100,000 euros per farm per year.

The Commission estimates that about 4 percent of beneficiaries received more than 20,000 euros in 2023 and that about 1,600 farms received between 100,000 and 255,000 euros.

Nobody should assume this survives. According to the Parliament briefing, the rapporteur Norbert Lins of the centre-right EPP proposed scrapping degressivity, raising the cap to 500,000 euros per natural person and making the 100,000 euro cap voluntary. The Cyprus presidency’s compromise texts for the Council contained no provisions on capping.

Germany, Czechia, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and Sweden publicly oppose making it mandatory. The farm lobby COPA-COGECA criticised the approach. Via Campesina backed it and wants a 60,000 euro cap. Environmental groups including Greenpeace welcomed mandatory limits. The briefing also flags a loophole fear: large firms splitting up farms or using subsidiaries in several countries to dodge a cap.

Look at that list of opponents again. Czechia sits on it, the country where the most famous Agrofert story began. Germany and Italy sit on it too, two countries whose top ten percent take about 59 and 69 percent of the money. The governments that would be most affected by a mandatory cap are the ones asked to vote for it.