American politicians have created a wretched system of agricultural subsidies, but it seems that Europe’s lawmakers win the prize for concocting the most perverse ways to squander tax money. The Times reports that there is now a secondary market in buying and selling agricultural subsidy entitlements:

City dwellers are making huge profits out of an EU loophole that allows people who have never set foot on a farm to claim European farm subsidies. …Auctioneers and brokers who used to sell cattle and farm-land are now focusing their attention on selling the rights to receive European taxpayers’ money — known as entitlement trading — in what one described as a “ferocious” market with the rights to subsidies “flying off the shelf”. …Open auctions are being held — with one in Aberdeen due next Friday — while investors are also buying the rights to subsidies over the telephone, through brokers, through internet auction sites and inter-active trading. …Under EU regulations, only someone classified as a farmer can buy the right to receive subsidies, but to be classified officially as a farmer, people need only hold a lease on a minimum of 1.7 acres for ten months of the year, and never need to visit it. Scottish landowners are now leasing out vast tracts of rocky highland for as little as £5 an acre a year, so that investors can claim to be farmers. For each acre you lease, you can buy annual subsidies averaging £100 an acre, but which can rise to over £1,000 an acre.

A newspaper in Scotland, meanwhile, reports that one dairy farmer has figured out how to scam the system for about $2 million per year — most of which is received as a subsidy for milk that does not exist:

A Scottish dairy farmer has exploited a glaring loophole in European law to annually earn the right to claim more than £1million in subsidies. William Hamilton and Sons, of Meldrum Farm, Blairdrummond, Stirling, has taken advantage of a flaw that allows it to get handouts on almost nine times the amount of milk it produces. Under EU law, the business will continue to qualify for the lottery-size payment annually until 2012 — even if it stops producing milk.