The food sector, not farming, is the future
One of the chief architects of that report, Dr Liam Downey, stood over that figure when Minister for Agriculture Mary Coughlan dismissed the findings, commissioned in fact by her own department.
She spoke about how that was not were she was coming from and offered platitudes about what her department was doing to ensure agriculture in Ireland has a bright future.
But the threat of 50,000 jobs to go under the terms struck at the latest WTO round suggests the future is anything but bright.
Another point needs to be made here. The last Enterprise Strategy Group report gave agriculture scant recognition. Published in July 2004 it consigned the sector to an appendix.
Time was when agriculture would be more than an appendix in a major report into the Irish economy.
While it has been given separate treatment elsewhere, the implication was that agriculture in particular, whatever about food, was less critical to the future of Ireland Inc than the sector imagined it to be.
The report in question was headed by a former chief executive of a US multinational in Ireland, Eoin O’Driscoll, which indicated a very definite bias towards the hi-tech sector.
If I was a farmer I would have been concerned the food sector was played down in the report.
The farm lobby stayed pretty mute, as if the silence was a tacit recognition of the changing face of the economy.
Nevertheless the report noted food and drink accounted for almost half of the sales created in the indigenous sector of Irish manufacturing and for 29% of all jobs back in 2002.
The broader sector is quite robust, thanks to Ireland’s green image and the evolving strategy of aligning ourselves to the wholesome image this country enjoys internationally as a haven for good food and drink.
The problem is that to have that impact requires fewer farmers, and that is at the core of the changing status of farming in Ireland.
Food companies led by the likes of Kerry and IAWS are thriving, but that success has very little reliance on Irish farmers or the amount of raw materials sourced by them from Irish farmers.
With the food sector getting more open to competition, the bottom line is that Ireland isn’t really geared to the ranch-type framing operating in countries such as the US and Brazil, where they also have the advantage of climate.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Brazils of this world and other major food producers are wiping us out. Brazil and the sugar industry is a case in point. We simply cannot compete.
Which brings me to the WTO deal and the alleged loss of 50,000 jobs over time as the withdrawal of food subsidies makes us less and less competitive in increasingly tough markets.
That’s the reality. Agriculture’s demise has been coming for a long time.
To a significant degree we never moved beyond agriculture as a means of survival rather than as a serious enterprise.
Nobody is to blame. For thousands, owning land meant survival and so too many held on for too long, preventing the evolution of scale in Irish agriculture.
Following EU membership, farming enjoyed an Indian summer, but land holdings stayed too small for too long and only those lucky enough or smart enough to have seen the writing on the wall tooled up to meet the challenge.
The WTO deal is another blow to those who fought to retain a certain way of life. The jobs were being lost anyway and the WTO is just a convenient peg on which to hang the wreath.
But there is another side to this story. Food, drink and horticulture exports are over e7 billion and the prospects for the food sector, not farming, are significant, provided we seize the opportunities.
That’s the way forward. It’s sad but true.
