IFA begins campaign to address farm crisis

FARMERS have their backs to the wall like never before, the IFA claimed yesterday, when it announced details of a family farm survival campaign.

John Dillon, IFA president, said a nationwide week-long tractor protest, starting next Monday, will be the first phase in the campaign.

Tractors will leave every county in the country and converge on Dublin at lunchtime on Friday, January 10, for a rally outside Government Buildings A tractorcade that will leave Bantry, Co Cork, will stop for a protest in Clonakilty, home town of Agriculture and Food Minister Joe Walsh, before continuing on its journey.

Farmers from other parts of the country will join the various convoys along the way to Dublin to highlight their income plight. The number of tractors involved in the protest is expected to reach almost 300 by Thursday night of next week.

These will be parked at six staging posts on the outskirts of the capital overnight and driven into Dublin city centre the following day, January 10, for the rally outside Government Buildings.

Mr Dillon said the IFA is determined to bring home to the Government the neglect of farming and the dire income situation threatening the very survival of full-time family farming in Ireland.

Mr Dillon told a press conference in Dublin yesterday that at a time when farming was already in crisis, the Government really put the boot in with the Budget and cuts in the 2003 Book of Estimates. "The crisis in farming has undermined confidence to an alarming extent, which the Government must address," he said.

Mr Dillon said farmers are frustrated and angry over a 13% cut in their living standards in 2002.

"We are surrounded by ever-increasing costs and bureaucracy, but the value of almost everything we sell is at rock-bottom," he said.

The IFA leader said that in the past 10 years over 20,000 farmers have been forced to get a job off the farm in order to provide a viable livelihood for their families.

He said Mr Walsh is now saying to the remaining full-time farmers your only alternative is to follow your neighbours out of full-time farming.

"I reject this approach and I am going to campaign to maintain the viability of full-time farming." Mr Dillon said the entire IFA organisation is being mobilised in a determined stand on each and every issue which is destroying their livelihoods.