How Europe’s Farm Subsidy Scheme Fails Workers
As lawmakers concentrate on meat bans, the CAP continues to bankroll exploitation in the fields
It’s been a week since the new EAT-Lancet report came out, and unsurprisingly, there’s unhappiness at both ends of the spectrum. What bemused me most was seeing it labelled as “anti-man”, “a fraud”, and “high-level brainwashing”, often with very little to back up the claims.
The tone echoed climate denialism and underscored the uphill climb ahead. Just this week, the European Parliament voted to ban meat names for plant-based foods. It seems consumer choice and freedom of speech doesn’t apply in this case.
Instead of reforming the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to improve the economic, social, and environmental well-being of Europe, as suggested by ample evidence, lawmakers seem intent on regulating meat alternatives and deregulating everything else.
Some say the policing of language was a distraction from the more worrying vote to “simplify” the massive agricultural subsidy scheme. I’m inclined to agree.
This issue is about a very timely cross-border investigation that illustrated the shortfalls of the current system in protecting a crucial asset of European agriculture: farm workers.
Full disclosure: I played a small role mentoring the team behind this. But I’m writing about it because:
1. It powerfully exposes how Europe’s food system runs on invisible labour, and a personal aim of mine is to encourage more journalists to investigate forces that shape our food and champion those who do it well,
2. For real change to happen, we need to keep banging on about these issues, over time, across multiple platforms, and through a variety of formats, styles, and intermediaries.
A question for fellow residents of the European Union: do you ever wonder about the people behind the delicious food we eat, especially the fruits and vegetables?
We love our markets, with their colourful array of fresh, seasonal, and tempting produce, yet we often forget that there is usually an army of poorly paid workers who are responsible for planting, picking, and packing the very produce that fills our plates.
In many cases, they do this under harsh conditions, with little job security, and even less recognition for the essential role they play, except during the COVID-19 lockdown when farm workers suddenly became “essential”. But that didn’t last very long, like our habit of wearing masks when unwell.
I’m not big on consumer shaming and consumer blaming. I believe most of us want to do the right thing, including supporting the farms (and farmers) who treat their staff and animals well. I also believe it’s incredibly hard for consumers to do the right thing when the system is skewed and opaque.
Still, I think it is critical that we keep ourselves informed about where our food comes from, who grows it, and under what conditions. Without understanding the human cost of our food, we can’t begin to fix the system that feeds us.
This is a story about the shocking disconnect between one of the world’s largest and most entrenched agricultural subsidy programmes and a blatant lack of oversight to ensure good labour practices among its beneficiaries.
This is something many of us know from anecdotal stories and news reports, but a cross-border team of journalists, with a grant from Journalismfund Europe tracked down and documented cases where farm owners convicted of exploiting (mostly migrant) farm workers continue to receive funding from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
These are the journalists who deserve the credit: Eoghan Gilmartin, Simon Guichard, Silvia Lazzaris, Meriem Mahdhi, Pascale Mueller, Franziska Schwarz, Hélène Servel and Jonas Seufert
The context
This has been said umpteen times but bears repeating: the CAP is the EU’s largest expenditure. At €378.5 billion, it represents about 25% of the budget for the period 2021 - 2027, or roughly €54 billion a year.
Established in 1962, in the shadow of World War II, the policy’s original aim was to support farmers and ensure food security so Europe would never go hungry again.
Six decades later, the policy still reigns, but it seems not to take into account the fact that the agriculture sector is characterised by widespread informal employment.
According to a September 2018 paper by the European Platform for Undeclared Work, 32% of all employees in the agricultural sector have no written contract of employment, compared with 5% for the overall EU workforce.
Over the past years, multiple investigations have exposed the terrible conditions endured by these workers, ranging from being underpaid and overworked to torture and even death, like the Jun 2024 case of an Indian farm labourer in Italy who was injured by heavy machinery and died after being allegedly left on the side of the road.
The social conditionality
In 2023, labour rights groups and progressive lawmakers who wanted to end such practices scored a rare win.
For the first time ever, EU farm subsidies (CAP payments) are linked to minimum social and labour standards. Farmers must comply with EU labour laws, health & safety regulations, working conditions, etc., to receive certain payments.
The “social conditionality” became mandatory across all EU member states from 2025 but Austria, France, and Italy voluntarily introduced it in 2023.
Right from the get go, however, there were concerns the rules fall far short of the game-changer they could have been due to a number of weakness, not least its over reliance on member states for the monitoring and enforcement of social conditionality.
Unfortunately, this investigation shows just how fragile the rules are.
How the investigation was done
They identified nearly 170 cases of labour law violations since 2015 across Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and France. After verifying each one through official documents, they cross-referenced the names with farmsubsidy.org which documents all CAP payments made between 2014 and 2022 and with various national CAP registers for 2023 and 2024.
See a more detailed methodology in l’Humanité.
What they found: Systemic Failure
30 farms and farm owners received at least €14 million in subsidies over the past decade, despite having breached workers’ rights, being under criminal investigation or had already been convicted of labour-related offences.
“Taken together, the thirty cases examined in the investigation reveal a structural deficiency in the CAP: in the absence of real controls over compliance with labor laws, agricultural companies convicted or under investigation for exploiting their workers have continued to receive millions in EU aid without consequences,” the journalists wrote in the Spanish news outlet El Salto.
Yoan Molinero, senior researcher at Comillas University’s centre for migration studies, told the journalists their findings reflect “the total disconnect between subsidies and social conditions of production.”
He told DeSmog that social conditionality in its current form is “less an initial step in the right direction towards protecting workers… and more a cosmetic measure”.
Simon Guichard, one of the journalists, told me: “What was most shocking was the ease with which the farmers in question continued to receive these public subsidies, while escaping prosecution and conviction.”
The tip of the iceberg
I will bet my bottom dollar the real number of cases is much higher and the actual labour violations even more so. Workers often lack the language, the resources, or the legal standing to report abuse, while employers exploit loopholes and opacity.
A lack of transparency and an absence of regulation from individual member states made it incredibly challenging for the journalists to get the exact number of cases across these five countries. I had a ringside view of the team spending months tracking down, compiling, and cross-referencing them.
“Press and court documents were often heavily edited or inaccessible, and the opaque movement of money through cooperatives and consortia meant it wasn’t always possible to verify whether an offender had received CAP funds,” they wrote in DeSmog.
“Although direct payments to individual farmers can be traced, a substantial portion of CAP funds are channeled through cooperatives and consortia, whose internal redistribution remains opaque. Furthermore, many of the agricultural businesses analysed are organised in such a way that the employing entity is not legally the same as the recipient of the subsidies, and in numerous cases, the management and supervision of the workforce is outsourced to temporary employment agencies”
What they found: Country Case Studies
In France, it is now up to labour inspectors to report their observations to the Ministry of Agriculture if they found breaches of labour law. This will trigger reductions in aid of between 1% and 5% for the first finding, and up to 15% in the event of a repeat offence, according to the article in l’Humanité.
But a government focused on placating farmers is limiting such work and inspectors fearful of rousing farmers’ anger warn the farmers in advance of inspections. The government never responded to the journalists’ queries about the number of farmers sanctioned and the amount of aid deducted.
Despite this, the journalists managed to find cases of worker exploitation.
They spoke to Moroccan workers who spend 14 - 15 hours a day picking fruit while being verbally abused by their supervisors, and sleeping in dirty, cramped rooms at night. Some are graduates who begged and borrowed money to pay employment agencies over €13,000 to get stable, permanent employment.
When a worker complained about unpaid overtime work, a foreman threatened to kill him. His former employer has since been arrested and charged with exploitation and a trial is scheduled to start in Spring 2026, but continues to receive EU subsidies.
Germany is a possible destination for the fruits the Moroccan labourers harvested, but there is currently no data on whether any sanctions have been imposed since the social conditionality has been in effect only since the beginning of 2025.
The first figures will not be available until the end of October at the earliest, according to the newspaper taz, but the journalists found cases that should be looked into.
For example, a Georgian worker who came to Germany to pick strawberries had contracts that clearly stipulated the conditions and payment for his work. The first company he worked for paid him half of what he thought he was owed. The second company didn’t pay him at all.
The worker and 18 others sued both companies. “Our research now shows that during the court proceedings, both companies continued to receive funding from the EU. A total of €63,000 in agricultural subsidies, a similar amount to previous years,” they wrote.
In Italy, the term caporalato has become synonymous with an illegal system of labour trafficking and exploitation and nearly 70% of farm inspections report contractual irregularities, the journalists wrote in L’Espresso.
They recounted how a farmer convicted of labour exploitation in 2023 received nearly €200,000 in CAP subsidies the following year – “almost enough to cover the €250,265 fine imposed as part of his sentence”.
There was also the case of a farm in Veneto that crammed 10 labourers into a room and subjected them to beatings and torture. While the case dragged on for years, the company collected €200,000 in CAP money.
How about the one in Puglia where farm workers were paid a pittance (€3 an hour) to do 14-hour shift without water. In the two years prior to the investigation, the farm owner pocketed nearly half a million in European funds. After agreeing to an 18-month prison sentence, he continued to receive funding.
Spain accounts for a third of the cases the team verified.
This includes the councillor for the centre-right Popular Party who, with two family members, was sentenced in 2024 to nine months in prison each for exploiting two irregular migrant labourers: working up to 13 hours a day without a contract or social security contributions, and without the right to days off or vacation. They were also ordered to compensate the two workers a total of €44,000. That same year, his farm also received €41,000 in CAP subsidies.
But the case of a berry producer in Huelva might provide the best - or the worst - example of the disconnect between CAP funding and the social conditionality. In 2023, the Labour Inspectorate found the company, one of the largest private beneficiaries of the CAP in Spain, did not pay overtime and failed to comply with legal working hours limits in its warehouses.
Yet, after the violations were confirmed, its subsidies increased: from €3.26 million in 2023 to €3.41 million in 2024. Worse, this funding would be exempt from sanctions because it was paid through another CAP scheme where the social conditionality does not apply, according to an expert.
The government told the journalists it reduced aid for 227 beneficiaries due to violations. This might sound like a lot but they pointed out it is “very small compared to the number of labour violations detected each year” in the sector: 7,449 in 2023, the latest year for which there is data.
In stark contrast is Austria where only a single farmer has been sanctioned since the country implemented the social conditionality voluntarily in 2023.
He was ordered to pay more than €3,000 for breaching it on two separate occasions in 2023 and 2024. This amounted to about 4% of the average €40,000 he received annually in CAP subsidies.
But the lack of sanctions doesn’t mean there aren’t any violations. The journalists met activists who spoke to dozens of workers from Serbia and Romania, none of whom are paid according to collective agreements, or given proper breaks, despite working in sweltering conditions in greenhouses in the summer.
Government inspectors also identified more than 850 violations in Burgenland in eastern Austria in 2023, an average of four violation per farm. Yet only three cases were reported to the authorities and none made it to the public prosecutor’s office. Sanctions are beyond its scope, the Ministry of Agriculture told Profil.
There has been pressure within the Austrian government to take action against unacceptable working conditions but the minister for agriculture and the Chamber of Agriculture are holding out, the outlet said.
What happens now?
Unfortunately, things might get worse if the EU institutions continue with their simplification drive for the CAP.
Observers said the next round of CAP, for the period 2028 - 2034, might weaken the social conditionality further by carving out exemptions for farms under 10 hectares. If so, this exemption would apply to nearly 70% of farms in the EU.
The Commission did not respond to DeSmog’s requests for comment.
“Workers’ rights cannot depend on the size of the farm,” Cristina Guarda, an Italian Green MEP and urban farmer, told the journalists.
“This amounts to saying that exploitation is acceptable as long as it takes place on a small scale.”
If the EU’s biggest agricultural programme cannot guarantee basic dignity for the hands that feed us, what hope do we have for a just food system?
Thin’s Pickings - the CAP exploitation edition
Translation software is your friend here.
Journalismfund Europe’s page on the investigation: Feeding Europe, Failing Workers: How CAP Fuels Exploitation
The English language story on DeSmog: Revealed: EU Farm Subsidy ‘Bankrolls’ Widespread Labour Abuse
l’Humanité (France): Agriculture : Comment la PAC finance l’exploitation des travailleurs dans l’Union Européenne
l’Humanité (France): Dans l’agriculture, la traite des êtres humains bat son plein
l’Humanité (France): Les « entreprises de travail temporaire », rouages essentiels et précieux fusibles de l’agriculture intensive
El Salto (Spain): Investigados y condenados por explotación laboral siguen recibiendo millones de euros de la PAC
Profil (Austria): Warum Ausbeutung in Österreichs Landwirtschaft kaum bestraft wird
Taz (Germany): Subventionen für Ausbeuter
L’Espresso (Italy): Sfruttano i braccianti e la ue li premia. L’inchiesta transfrontaliera sul caporalato
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