By supporting family farming you protect rural Ireland
My association welcomed the launch of the Commission for the Economic Development of Rural Areas report, and I’m delighted to say that after a degree of close study we’re very happy to acknowledge that there seems to be a great deal in it of real value and insight.
As retail patterns switch online. and as physical retailing and consumption increasingly moves into suburban or urban retail parks, the decline is most pronounced in towns within a handy drive of the bigger urban centres.
The changing pattern of retail consumption, however, is not ICMSA’s core concern. Our business is reminding people of the reality that if we want a prosperous rural Ireland then the simplest way of ensuring that is to support our farming community.
That’s why when we see recommendations about allocations of EU rural development funding ‘outside the farm gate’ that would actually result in a cut to farm schemes, we have to express disagreement. We know for a fact that increasing the prosperity of family farms is the most tried and trusted way of increasing the prosperity of our rural economy overall. The best way of developing a healthy rural economy is developing and helping our family farm system go forward and prosper.
A perfect example of this tendency to ignore logic and long history is to be found in the beef sector. Raising beef is vital to Ireland’s rural economy and 90% of that beef is exported.
Last Thursday, I attended a beef summit called by Minister Coveney and attended by all the stakeholders in the Irish beef sector. I called for the setting up of a Beef Market Monitoring Agency of a similar type to that announced by the EU last year for the dairy markets. It’s no longer acceptable or sensible for beef suppliers — and the rural economy in which they spend their incomes — to be left completely at the whim of the factories, processors and retailers in terms of price and it was vital for all parties — including the beef factories themselves — that some degree of predictability and viability was restored to the business of finishing cattle.
The point here is that it’s not just a question of being fair to the farmers but of drawing the very direct line from the farmers to their local rural economies and recognising that these two are absolutely intertwined and co-dependent.
The present system where farmers invest up to three years in producing cattle, only to be told at the last minute that all the factory specifications had changed and their work was ‘down the drain’, is utterly unfair and will eventually wreck beef production in Ireland.
The remit of the Dairy Market Monitoring Agency is precisely this kind of ‘look forward’ to where supply and demand conditions might change in a way that would radically alter price and the timely recommendation of policies that would ameliorate those drastic price swings.
It’s now very obvious that a similar type of agency was needed to look at the Irish and wider EU beef markets into which a huge portion of our beef is exported with the task of ‘smoothing out’ the factory to farmer price and moving those prices onto a viable basis that greatly reduced the kind of utterly destructive treatment of beef farmers that we had seen since before Christmas.
