Huge PR win for IFA — and Govt
Yet some people in the farming community are still wondering what it was all about and what was achieved? When I heard that Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney welcomed the protest, I thought “That’s a bit odd”.
Surely, a protest indicates that its participants believe something is wrong. It was seen as a vehicle to get across to the Government the message that life and business also exist outside bigger urban areas — that’s not a bad reason.
Farmers were told, in advance, that the main reason for the Day of Action was to secure the CAP budget from a “bad deal” which could cost “thousands of jobs” and undermine “the viability of our most productive farmers”.
My question is, ‘did the IFA leadership bring specific plans or ideas to Dublin last Tuesday on how to avoid these possibilities, other than seek the aid of the Government and the EU’? From what I heard, read and saw, the answer is no.
I’m not trying to take from the protest.
However, we need clear ideas on how Irish farming can avoid losing out in the forthcoming CAP negotiations.
Tuesday, Oct 9 was a huge PR victory for both the IFA and the Government; a victory of size and style over substance.
In an interview I did with Joe Duffy, on Live Line on the Tuesday of the Dublin protest, I said that the minister’s payment-approximation plan to ease the pain of the European Commission’s attempt to flatten all farm payments was not helpful to productivity.
Equally, the IFA position of maintaining the level and division of payments as they are, at present, does not take into account that the calculations were done 10 years ago, and ignores those who may have small or no payments, or who have entered farming in the intervening time.
In my opinion, we need a new reference period, one that takes account of those who are farming now.
The payments made by the EU to the Irish farming sector, as distributed at present, should not be viewed as their property by those who receive them.
The payments are not ‘family silver’.
Recalculating the payments with a new reference period would be a relatively simple process. Maybe, that’s the problem, it’s too simple, and some of the current, bigger recipients could lose out very heavily, if payments are tied to productivity and the amount of land farmed.
Broaden out the discussion on CAP reform and you discover that other member states are not happy with the EU proposals, either.
A document I received from the Hungarian embassy, entitled The Hungarian position on the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, cites a grievance: “the current proposal does not serve the first objective of the CAP, the increase of agricultural production”.
OK, they have their own reasons for saying that, but it’s a pointed reminder as to why the CAP exists.
They also propose what they call a “differentiated payment system”, which I take to mean different payments for different sectors.
At least, Hungary seems to have a clear plan on how to try and improve its take from the CAP.
And one of countries supporting them is Romania, the homeland of EU Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Ciolos.
