Farm ministry closes loophole allowing big landowners access to farm subsidies

Budapest, July 15 (MTI) – Hungary’s agriculture ministry is closing a loophole that big land owners use to get around an exclusion from European Union farmland subsidies, daily Napi Gazdasag said on Wednesday.

Owners of more than 1,200 hectares of farmland are ineligible for the EU’s single area subsidies, but some are still collecting them by “artificially” dividing up their holdings to bring each piece under the area threshold, the paper said.

The farm ministry has transposed a 2013 EU directive into national law that sanctions such divisions of land holdings. The regulations, in force retroactively from 2011, will prevent landowners who are ineligible for the subsidies from collecting them in this way, the paper said.

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Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters