G8 good for Irish farmers

IT will be a good while yet before John Dillon and Irish farmers are down to their last few coffee beans.

The IFA President feared last weekend's G8 meeting of world leaders in Gleneagles could pull all farmers down to the level of coffee bean growers, relegated to poverty by international commodity traders and agri-corporations.

The truth was that the leading industrialised nations made no real agricultural trade reform decisions in Gleneagles. They only repeated what the four major trading powers the EU, the US, Japan and Canada had already promised in World Trade Organisation talks.