Somewhat astonishingly, for years now the European Union has managed to dole out a giant chunk of its operating budget -- some 40% -- in the form of farm subsidies under its Common Agricultural Policy, intended to help struggling farmers get along but often go to line the pockets of wealth-off growers, while never really revealing just who the €55 billion goes to enrich. But journalists and activists have, under freedom of information provisions, been beating down the doors of member state governments in attempts to get the subsidy data and then, importantly, make sense of it.

Thus, farmsubsidy.org.

The website, run by some of those same journalists and activists, collects and collates the subsidy data from 26 of the 27 EU member states (sans the black box that is Greece).

The mishmash of farm data that comes out of these countries can make it extremely difficult to discover that, say, Nestlé is raking in enormous subsidies in the U.K. and Spain and Portugal -- making it trying to create farm policy reform when we're operating without event knowing who's getting how much and for what.

Such subsidies, the argument goes, skew the world market, leaving poorer countries to cope with artificially low prices on everything from British sugar to German wheat. And in the U.K., they've been shown to go to the wealthiest of landowners, even though the stated goal of the subsidies is to help poor formers and keep food affordable.

(Photo used under a Creative Commons license; credit: law_keven)