Reduction in off-farm income has deep impact on families, says MEP
While 58% of farm households had off-farm income at the economic peak in 2006, today’s figure is closer to 28%, the Ireland East MEP told yesterday’s annual farm seminar in the Lismullin Conference Centre in Meath.
“Research shows that the income earned by spouses, mostly women, is significant in sustaining both the household and expanding the farm business,” Ms McGuinness said.
The main implication of this drastic income reduction is that it will become rarer for anyone to gain entry to farming by any means other than inheritance. This bottleneck is compounded, she explained, by land in Ireland costing more than 33 times the average profit per hectare.
“This arises because at more than 33 times the average profit per hectare, the price of land is high, but there is also the issue of limited land availability with only 0.1% of total farmland sold on the open market in 2010,” Ms McGuinness said.
She said the reliance on off-farm income to sustain the farm business is both a strength and a weakness of the Irish family farm model.
Family farms transfer land from generation to generation. Ms McGuinness said support for the family farm model is strong in the EU, “even if it means different things in different member states”.
She noted that the UN has designated 2014 as the international year of family farming.
There are 12m farms in the EU, mainly family farms, with over 139,000 farmers in Ireland. Globally there are 400m family farms.
“That support for family farming is matched by a commitment to funding the CAP and maintaining payments to farmers, but to require them to deliver more ‘public goods’ to society,” Ms McGuinness said.
“But a key dilemma remains that market prices for farm commodities do not reward producers sufficiently for their efforts. Failure to do so could result in insufficient investment on farms, which is not sustainable.”
