IFA: Dairy farmers in urgent need of low-cost loans
Proposed by the IFA, the loans are expected to come with built-in repayment breaks to ease farmers’ 2016 cashflow difficulties.
The promise of improving milk prices in the coming months will not ease cashflow issues in the short term.
Mr O’Leary said: “This summer, IFA made detailed proposals for the minister to use EU concessions on state aid and existing state aid provisions to offer all farmers low-cost cashflow loans.
"For dairy, those loans must include an upfront moratorium on repayments until milk prices and incomes improve sufficiently.”
The IFA says such a loan would let farmers convert their accumulated merchant credit, utility, superlevy, tax and other bills into short-term finance giving them badly needed liquidity relief until their incomes recover.
