Learning lunch: How agriculture pollutes our waters (and the EU does ‘too little, too late’)

Join us for a learning lunch on Wednesday, February 8, from 13:00 -14:15 CET. Click here to join.

60 per cent of Europe’s surface water (lakes, rivers etc.) are not in a good chemical or ecological status, and more than a quarter of the ground water is in the same state – and industrial agriculture remains one of the main pressures on our water bodies. These numbers are probably even underestimated, due to insufficient data and the current testing practices.

These are some of the conclusions highlighted in “Troubled Waters”, a new research project by Jelena Prtorić from Arena for Journalism in Europe and Luisa Izuzquiza from the German NGO FragDenStaat. The two

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Billions of public funds for big business – the Farmsubsidy database relaunched

The EU hands out more than €50 bn of public funds to the agricultural sector every year. The political side claims to support sustainable farming and family businesses, but the figures show otherwise. The big agricultural sector industries, corporations, the Catholic church and others are among the major beneficiaries, according to a series of fresh investigations published today.

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Arena launches Food & Water Network – join in!

At the European Investigative Journalism Conference – Dataharvest in May 2022 we jointly launched the Food & Water Network. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Mechelen, 50 journalists, civil society representatives and academics came together at the conference’s Food & Water Roundtable to discuss key issues and necessary research around food and water across Europe.

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