Stephen Cadogan: Happy to produce €10 billion per year more by 2025
One of those to question this very ambitious target is Alan Matthews, professor emeritus of European Agricultural Policy at Trinity College.
He points out that you have to go back to the ‘golden age’ for the Irish agri-food sector, following EU membership in the 1973-84 period, for anything near a precedent.
In that 11-year period, the volume of primary agricultural output increased 50%.
But prospects are not so good, 42 years later.
From 1990 to 2010, the volume of agricultural output was stagnant.
But it jumped almost 27% since 2010 (of which about one third was volume-related, and the rest price-related).
A repeat of these volume and price increases will be needed to meet the FW2025 target.
Therefore, optimistic farmers reading the Food Wise 2025 plan can perhaps hope that the committee that prepared it expects another big price rise for farm produce.
Of course, they can confidently expect milk output to grow 50% (as projected in the 2020 industry plan now replaced by Food Wise 2025).
But milk is only quarter of the value of agricultural output, points out Alan Matthews in his capreform.eu blog.
And he warns that relying on continued price increases may be imprudent.
Neither the European Commission, OECD, or FAO expects much further uplift in prices for the main commodities produced by the Irish agricultural sector.
Instead, the economics of farming may go in the opposite direction, with prices expected to rise for energy and fertiliser.
That’s another burden for Irish farmers, to add to longstanding Irish disadvantages such as poor farm business structures, poor age structure, and the related lack of land mobility.
However, there is one sure way the planned 65% increase in value of agriculture, forestry and fisheries output can be achieved.
The food processing and food retail leaders who made up nearly half of the 2025 Agri-Food Strategy Committee can choose to pay primary producers enough to play their part in the plan, and to increase value of their output 65%, as planned.
After all, they depend on those primary producers as the key movers in the overall plan to increase the value of agri-food exports by 85%, to €19 billion; increase value added in the sector by 70%, to €13 billion; increase primary production 65%; and deliver a further 23,000 jobs by 2025.
Not only do they depend on the primary producers to deliver the raw material (helped by the abolition of milk quotas), they must do it in an environmentally efficient and sustainable manner.
A guiding principle of the entire Food Wise 2025 will be that environmental protection and economic competiveness will be considered as equal and complementary.
One will not be achieved at the expense of the other.
That means no short cuts for farmers trying to look after their bottom line, if volatile world prices head in the wrong direction.
Their raw material must live up to the demands of the world’s richest consumers, who want more natural foods, the provenance of which is known, which are sustainably produced, and which can be shown to meet a range of ‘free-from’ requirements.
To achieve and be able to demonstrate these environmental and sustainability credentials, farmers will have to adopt new methods, such as the Carbon Navigator initiative, grass measurement, profit monitors, knowledge transfer, using the Pasture Base Ireland tool, using genomics to improve livestock genetic merit, and using the Beef Healthcheck programme and Beef and Lamb Quality Assurance Scheme.
At the same time, they are expected to expand Irish dairy cow numbers by up to 30%.
No problem there — farmers will do the job, if there’s an adequate price package, to bring their targeted value of output increase up to that 65% Food Wise 2025 figure.
