‘System has trapped farmers in subsidy-driven rat race’
He welcomed the proposals for a new system, which he predicts will put more money into farmers’ pockets in return for producing high quality food for the European market.
He said: “It is time to bin the current system, which has trapped farmers in a subsidy-driven rat race, where their quality produce is exploited with low prices and where they are bound in a bureaucratic straitjacket.”
Mr Kilmartin, from Danestown, Balrath, Navan, believes farmers need to be freed from tedious paperwork, allowing them instead to return to the business of producing food for real and profitable markets.
“This cannot be achieved under the current CAP, where farmers are forced to over-produce for the subsidy rather than meeting the real demands for quality produce,” he said.
The main element of the Fischler proposal for CAP reform is to decouple subsidies from production and instead to reward farmers for the production of more sustainable levels of high quality food and the enhancement of the rural environment.
“This will be more profitable for farmers, more responsive to consumers, better value for taxpayers and good for the environment,” he said.
Mr Kilmartin, who is chairman of the ICSA Beef Committee and farms 250 acres with 300 cattle at any one time with his father Laurence, said the present system linking subsidies to production is a numbers game.
It is about the number of cattle you can turn over in as quick a time as possible and the highest number of premiums you can get in any given year, he said.
However, an annual payment on an area basis would enable farmers focus better on producing better quality animals and produce for the market.
It would also involve a lot less hassle with paperwork, which currently involves the risk of making a mistake in premium applications that could incur severe penalties.
Dismissing the “myth” that farmers would get paid under the new system for doing nothing, Mr Kilmartin said there is obviously going to be some minimum production level to be maintained in order to draw down this payment.
