Back to the drawing board on Milk Quota Exchange
While EU bureaucracy gets a bashing from farmers, the complexity of schemes generated in this country is frequently not far behind that of the work of the Eurocrats.
Farmers cannot be blamed for thinking the sound advice of ‘simple is best’ has been abandoned.
Some schemes resemble the outcome of a competition to find the most complex way of doing a simple task.
Inevitably the more complex the regulations, the more scope for problems, which follow as sure as night follows day. Often, well intentioned principles finish up as self-defeating.
The much debated Milk Quota Exchange has developed into another example of progressing from an allocation system that wasn’t perfect to a far worse situation — in which trying to get additional quota is likened to guessing the winning lotto combination. Bid too much and you’re out, offer too little and you fail.
According to ICMSA, the average cost has increased from 12 cent per litre in the old Milk Restructuring Scheme to 17 cent in the Exchange.
And 1,676 farmers planning to expand production, who would have got an allocation under restructuring, qualified for nothing from the Exchange.
Trying to strike a reasonable balance between recompense for the seller of quota and the cost to the purchaser was never going to be completely satisfactory to both sides.
For all of its inadequacies, the old defined allocation system of the Restructuring Scheme directed available quota to the most deserving at a fixed price. Some farmers fell between categories and suffered as a result, but the outcome was not nearly as uncertain as that of the Milk Quota Exchange, which was far too complex from its birth.
