Denmark

Journalists’ farm subsidy victory for European FOI and CAR

Tuesday, 23 January 2007, 11:44

Yesterday’s Guardian had a fascinating story about the EU’s decision to release all of its data about the beneficiaries of its farming subsidies.

David Hencke’s article shows how the rare cooperation of local journalists in many EU countries in a sophisticated research project based on Freedom of Information requests and computer-assisted reporting techniques led to this important development in openness at the EU level.

Danish CAR specialist Nils Mulvad was one of the first to probe this story, using the Danish FOI law to obtain CAP data for his country. Journalists from many oher countries later joined forces to establish the website farmsubsidy.org, which collects stories about CAP disclosures across the EU into a searchable database.

The site was modelled on a similar effort in the United States where the Environmental Working Group has maintained a searchable database of Federal farm subsidies since the Washington Post first forced their disclosure through an FOI case in 1996.

But what Hencke’s story also reveals is that when it suits government policy to release formerly secret data, it can be eager to do so. When the CAP subsidies were released last year, the government argued in favour of disclosure against the farming lobby. I recall being very surprised by Defra’s eagerness to respond to the FOI request by the Guardian.

Hencke’s story reveals the important role that Jack Thurston, a former special advisor to agriculture minister Nick Brown, had in having the CAP figures for England and Wales released without a fight.

As minister, Brown had become aware of the fact that the largest CAP recipients in Britain included major corporations and the royal family. The Data Protection Act appeared to bar him from disclosing this, however.

Thurston later joined the Foreign Policy Centre think tank, where he wrote a pamphlet calling for disclosure of CAP subsidies. When Freedom of Information Act came into force in 2005, Thurston knew exactly what to ask for:

While the Guardian was publicly demanding the information, Thurston was using his Labour connections to press Margaret Beckett, then agriculture secretary, and Larry Whitty, the farms minister, and advisers to Gordon Brown, to concede. The government agreed and Britain became the first big member of the EU to release the information.

This long-fought campaign was certainly a great success for European journalism — and those European governments seeking farm subsidy reform at the EU level. It shows how freedom of information does not always have to be an adversarial game between a government and its citizens. Sometimes governments can be persuaded of seeing openness as being useful for improving policy.

(In any event, for helping to spread CAR techniques — and showing genuine political successes with it — Mulvad and his new business partner in Denmark, Tommy Kaas, should go on that growing list of new role models for journalism students.)

2 comments

Canada warns the US (and Europe) over Arctic

Sunday, 29 January 2006, 10:47

Canada’s incoming Conservative government was supposed to forge warmer relations with Washington. But the Canadian prime minster-designate, Stephen Harper has already started making decidedly frosty noises about the United States meddling in some of the coldest places on Earth:

… on Thursday as the Prime Minister-elect used his first post-election press conference to take direct aim at David Wilkins, the US ambassador to Canada, who last week described the North-west Passage as “neutral waters”.

Mr Harper was not asked by reporters about the ambassador’s comment, but he refused to let it pass unchallenged.

“The United States defends its sovereignty, the Canadian government will defend our sovereignty,” he said. “It is the Canadian government we get our mandate from, not the ambassador of the United States.”

Some background, from the Toronto Star:

… most media hadn’t paid attention to Wilkins’ remarks, largely because they weren’t news. The United States, as well as Japan and the European Union, insist that the ice-choked passage, which winds through the archipelago of the Canadian Arctic to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is an international waterway.

Theoretically, Canada disagrees. But since 1945, it has signed a host of secret treaties that give American warships and submarines unimpeded access to these and other Canadian waters.

In 1988, Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney and U.S. president Ronald Reagan signed a pact whereby Washington agreed to tell Ottawa before sending non-military ships through the Northwest Passage.

In return, Ottawa agreed to never say no.

Harper wants to spend lots of Canadian dollars on underwater sensors and a new deep-water harbour in Iqaluit. But as the Star piece points out, the practical effect of all this posturing is more or less nil:

Is Harper prepared to tear up the treaties that already give the U.S. effective carte blanche in the Arctic? Would his three icebreakers attempt to ram the American fleet if it decided to steam through the Northwest Passage?

If his underwater sensors detect a U.S. submarine skulking along the coast of Ellesmere Island, would he have the Canadian Forces drop depth charges?

Still, it’s symbolically important. Asserting sovereignty over its sparcely populated but resource-rich Arctic archipeligo is of major symbolic significance for Ottawa, and has in recent years become one of Canada’s major foreign and defence policy objectives.

But it has become a bigger issue in recent years. With global warming making the Arctic region increasingly accessible, there is an increased interest in exploring for fossil fuels and trade routes. Long-dormant border disputes among the normally friendly Arctic countries suddenly have real consequences and are being re-examined.

Sometimes it is just symbolic. Canada’s maritime border with Greenland is fairly settled — with one tiny exception. Hence last summer’s kerfuffle with Denmark over barren Hans Island.

But there are also places where serious oil exploration, fishing and shipping rights are at stake. For example, there’s the small matter of the 30-year-old dispute between the United States and Canada over how Alaska’s border with Canada’s Yukon Territory extends into the Beaufort Sea. While Canada asserts that Alaska’s long straight land border along 140° west longitude should extend into the sea, the U.S. argues that the maritime border should be perpendicular to the shoreline, resulting in a triangular wedge of disputed — and potentially oil-rich — ocean territory just northeast of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The US Minerals Management Service, which oversees drilling on the United States’ continental shelf, estimates that the Beaufort Sea could contain about 7 billion barrels of oil and 32 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. In August 2004, the Minerals Management Service sold leases for oil development including a handful of tracts inside the disputed region, prompting a diplomatic protest from Ottawa. The State Department responded by reaffirming the American claim.

This is not the last we will have heard of this issue.

Add comment

Canada flexes Arctic muscles

Monday, 29 August 2005, 14:48

For those who have missed it, the NATO allies Canada and Denmark are in a border spat over a tiny, remote island off Greenland north of the Arctic Circle.

The RCN has been conducting “Arctic sovereignty patrols” in the nippy region. In July, the RCN planted a flag on Hans Island, and the Canadian defense minister Bill Graham later made an unannounced visit, prompting protests from Copenhagen, which dispatched its own naval ships to region. Before things got ugly, the two countries decided to settle the dispute at the United Nations.

Now Canada is set to use a privatly-owned satellite to monitor the Arctic north, according to ministerial briefing notes obtained by the Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, Candada’s Freedom of Information legislation:

Canada will be spending C$400m on images from the Radarsat 2 satellite, which will be launched next summer:

Passing over the North Pole 14 times daily, recording images of ships, aircraft — even pollution — at a rate of 3,000 square kilometres per second, it will be the linchpin in the Canadian military’s Project Polar Epsilon.

The documents insist that “Polar Epsilon has no connection to the U.S. ballistic missile defence program.”

Update: Here’s a post putting all this into context from the Canadian position.

1 comment