 news website reported. Farmers can claim £190 per hectare per year for land they leave fallow but, since 2017, Dutch authorities have found that 231 farms applied for subsidies on land they did not own. Land used for wrongful claims The investigation by Dutch authorities came after the national forestry commission, the largest landowner in the Netherlands, found that thousands of hectares of its land had been claimed by farmers. Infrastructure ministry and natural heritage organisation land has also been used for wrongful claims since 2017. The scale of the problem is likely to be even larger because many landowners will never discover their land has been claimed for, FTM reported. The Dutch agricultural ministry has now called on landowners not involved in farming to register their property with the RVO enterprise agency to stop farmers using its portal to wrongly claim cash from Brussels. At least 98 per cent of EU agricultural subsidies must be correctly allocated in a year or refunded to Brussels at the cost of the taxpayer. Last year, the Netherlands missed the target, which the government said was down to 'claims for subsidies for agricultural land for which there was no written permission from the owner'. 'Susceptible to fraud' The Public Prosecution Service has criticised how the 'excessively complex and therefore very susceptible to fraud' subsidies are distributed and warned it is impossible to 'get this system un){kind=link}
Government says the system is so complex it is impossible to get fraud under control
Dutch farmers have been fraudulently claiming huge sums in EU subsidies for farmland they don’t own or lease, according to news reports in the Netherlands.
The scale of the abuse is so large that the Dutch government blames it for the Netherlands missing EU accuracy targets for the allocation of subsidies, with authorities saying the system is so complex it is impossible to get fraud under control.
The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy spent £48.3 billion on subsidies in 2021, with £779.5 million going to Dutch farmers, the Follow The Money (FTM) news website reported.
Farmers can claim £190 per hectare per year for land they leave fallow but, since 2017, Dutch authorities have found that 231 farms applied for subsidies on land they did not own.