New IFA president says CAP negotiations will be major priority
“The CAP has been of vital importance to both producers and consumers. For an investment of about €100 for each citizen, European consumers enjoy a plentiful supply of high quality safe food at affordable prices,” he said.
Mr Bryan said the founding fathers of the European Community would be justifiably proud of the success of the CAP in ensuring food security and quality and in helping to bring down the average weekly spend of household income on food for families from 30% in 1980 to 13% today.
He will also tell the IFA’s 55th annual general meeting in his inaugural address that food security was important when the common agricultural policy was first established and is just as important today.
“In the upcoming negotiations, our Government must strongly defend the record of the CAP, and insist on the maintenance of a fully-funded, index-linked CAP budget for Ireland,” he said.
Mr Bryan, who succeeds Padraig Walshe as the IFA’s thirteenth president, said the single farm payment post-2013 must be directed to supporting active farmers.
“Farmers will not tolerate any reduction in their single payment and IFA will use all our resources in Ireland and in Brussels to protect the single payment in its present form,” he said.
“In the CAP negotiations, I will also be stressing that food production, based on permanent pasture, as operates in Ireland, is both environmentally sustainable and positive for climate change.
“This must be recognised in the CAP post-2013,” he said.
Meanwhile, the IFA’s new Sheep Committee chairman, James Murphy, Fiddawn, Inistioge, Co Kilkenny, said his number one priority will be increasing the incomes of the country’s 30,000 sheep farmers.
Strong viable lamb prices from the factories, the payout of the €18m unused CAP funds for sheep farmers, the rejection of compulsory electronic identification of sheep and a new and properly funded REPS scheme will be his immediate priorities.
