UAE’s ruling royal family benefits from more than €71m in EU farming subsidies

The United Arab Emirates’ ruling royal family is benefiting from tens of millions in EU subsidies to grow crops destined for the Gulf, it can be revealed. A cross-border investigation by DeSmog and shared with the Guardian found subsidiaries controlled by the Al Nahyans collected more than €71m (£61m) in six years for farmland it controls in Romania, Italy and Spain. The Al Nahyan family is the second richest in the world, with an estimated wealth of more than $320bn (£235bn), mostly derived from the Emirates’ vast oil reserves. Subsidies under the common agricultural policy (Cap) make up a third of the EU’s entire budget, paying out about €54bn each year to farmers and rural areas across the bloc. But an unknown proportion of this ends up in the hands of foreign investors – including those controlled by autocratic states. DeSmog, in partnership with Spain’s El Diario and Romanian news outlet G4Media, reviewed data for thousands of Cap beneficiaries between 2019 and 2024, tracing 110 European subsidy payments to a network of companies and subsidiaries controlled by the UAE’s Al Nahyan family and one of its sovereign wealth funds, ADQ. The largest of these payments came through the Romanian agricultural company Agricost, which owns the EU’s single largest farm, measuring 57,000 hectares (141,000 acres), five times the size of Paris. …