Harvesting Subsidies...

One of the realities of growing olives here is that you're apt to spend nearly as much time doing paperwork to get your EU subsidy as you do actually being a farmer. That's long been the case, but this year it went right over the top when Brussels enacted some fundamental changes in the way the subsidy is calculated and left the implementation of the new master plan in the able hands of the Junta de Andalucia. (Borat could have stayed much closer to home).

Paramount among the absurdities in the new legislation is the fact that the subsidy is no longer tied to the land that produces the crop today, but rather to the person that produced it during the years 1999 to 2003. It works like this. The EU decided to unlink the payment from production beginning in the 2005-06 crop year, instead making it a fixed payment through 2013 based on the average subsidy paid to a given operation in the four years beginnning in 1999. That sum then belongs to that producer, regardless of the physical land he exploits now or might be exploiting in the future. In other words, if the oil production from a five hectare orchard got you an average of 1500 euros a year during the reference years, you would be credited with five hectares of subsidy at 200 euros a hectare for the rest of the term - and it's portable. You can sell your land and buy five hectares down the road and still get paid.

One big glitch in the plan is that there remain in Andalucia vestiges of antiquated landlord-tenant relationships, mostly in the form of sharecropping agreements. They're very simple. A sharecropper agrees to run the operation, paying all the labour costs but splitting expenses like fertilizer on, say, a 60-40 basis. The landowner would get the smaller amount. Under the old subsidy regime, unfortunately as it turns out, each party claimed his or her own grant from the EU by claiming that the appropriate percentage of the trees were actually "theirs", regardless of the actual title. The sharecropper's Declaración de Cultivo would list 600 trees of a 1000 tree exploitation as "his" and the subsidy would be paid directly to him and the owner would do the same with his 40 percent. In other words, any person who has claimed a subsidy from 1999 to 2003 still has the right to the money, whether he farms olives currently or not. The two years in between 2003 and 2005 cause a big, but not insurmountable problem. Making sure that the appropriate people get to claim is a little complicated, but the legislation takes this into account with the creation of the Reserva Nacional, a kind of bank of subsidies held by the government to dish out to people who fell into that two-year fissure. That is, the problem had a solution - until it got into the digestive tract of the Andalucian regional government.

What they decided in Sevilla, in stubborn defiance of the arithmetic of the situation, was that any person with rights to a subsidy in 2006 but without the land to claim it would have three years in which to rectify that situation. Suddenly, the calculations become resistant, because if it can be safely assumed that for every hectare of subsidy held by a person with no land there is a corresponding hectare owned by a person with no rights who will be applying for them. And it is an equally sure bet that those on the other side of the transaction will be looking for land. But no one knows how many will find what they're looking for. Consequently, the Junta has no idea what their ultimate financial responsibility will be at the end of the three years. Their solution? To do whatever is humanly possible to prevent unsubsidized owners from getting their approval before that time, because if they get it wrong they've got it wrong until 2013. The last item of documentation they requested from me - nine months after I made my first application as an aggrieved party - was the identity card of a person who died in 2001.

I found it, I'm sure they were glad to hear.

Real olive news is in short supply as harvest approaches. However, the January, March and May contracts on the MFAO have declined slightly to about 2280€/tonne.