How concentrated support is among beneficiaries
Lorenz curve and Gini index on direct FEAGA payments 2024, calculated per individual beneficiary.
In 2024, FEAGA disbursed about €3.98 billion in Italy to 713,545 beneficiaries with a positive net amount, identified by tax code or VAT number. The distribution of this amount among beneficiaries is far from uniform: the Gini index, which equals 0 under perfect equidistribution and tends toward 1 as payments concentrate on fewer recipients, stands at 0.724 for 2024 — a high level of concentration, comparable to wealth concentration in many advanced economies.
In practical terms, the top 10% of beneficiaries by amount received — where large agro-industrial groups, sizeable cooperatives and above-average-scale farms weigh heavily — alone receive 62.3% of the funds disbursed. The top 1% alone receives 28.4%. At the other end, the bottom 50% of beneficiaries by amount together receive just 7.2% of the total: half of all CAP recipients together receive less than a tenth of what the largest 10% receive on their own.
Why FEASR is not yet included
The rural development fund is excluded from this analysis: the public beneficiary file covers only part of the FEASR spending actually disbursed in 2024.
AGEA's 2024 Annual Report reports a national CAP payment total of €7.83 billion, split between FEAGA (2023-27 programming plus old schemes, €4.02 billion in total) and FEASR (2014-22 old programming plus new 2023-27, €3.81 billion in total). Comparing these official totals with the public beneficiary file used for this analysis, FEAGA reconciles to within under 1% (€3.98 billion versus €4.02 billion official): it can therefore be considered representative of the national beneficiary population.
FEASR, on the other hand, appears in the public file for only €1.75 billion, less than half of the official total of €3.81 billion. The most likely cause, not confirmed by an official methodological note, is that the beneficiary file mainly covers the current 2023-27 programming period, while a substantial share of residual payments from the 2014-22 programming — which in 2024 still accounted for €2.62 billion nationally — does not appear in the same export. AGEA's transparency portal only publishes the last two financial years (2024 and 2025): there is no separate beneficiary file for the old FEASR programming from which to recover the missing figure.
For this reason, the Gini index for FEASR is not published in this version. It will be added only if a source is found that verifiably covers the entirety of 2024 FEASR spending, or explicitly flagged as partial if it cannot be completed.
What this index does not yet measure
Beneficiaries are identified by individual tax position, not by controlling corporate group.
The calculation excludes 940 positions with a negative net amount (adjustments or recoveries from previous years, totaling about €22.5 million): those beneficiaries remain in the national total but do not contribute to the concentration calculation in this version.
The main limitation of the calculation is that beneficiaries are identified by individual tax code or VAT number, not by controlling corporate group: related companies with multiple separate VAT numbers (parent company, subsidiaries, cooperatives belonging to a consortium) appear as separate beneficiaries. Actual concentration of support within large agro-industrial groups is therefore likely higher than what is measured here, not lower.