The new CAP is good on new planting, but is “missing out on an easy win” with respect to Ireland’s hedgerows, according to a lobby group.
Alan Moore of Hedgerows Ireland told an Oireachtas committee that new CAP schemes should recognise and reward good hedgerow management.
“We felt it was a real missed opportunity in the CAP that the quality of existing hedgerows wasn’t recognised,” Mr Moore said.
He said that under pillar two, the opportunity is greatest for a results-based scheme to focus on existing hedgerow quality.
“There’s a lot about rejuvenating and replanting and new planting but nothing about existing hedgerow quality,” he told the joint committee on agriculture, food, and the marine.
“That could be remedied.
“We don’t know what the final schemes will be, but it looks like the recommendations from our group, and several other similar submissions were rejected where it was suggested that the quality and management of existing hedgerows should be rewarded in both pillar one and pillar two schemes giving a financial incentive for taller, wider, more productive hedges.”
However, the Green Party’s Brian Leddin said he does not think the “door is closed on that yet”.
“I think if we make enough noise about it, we can provide further value to farmers, that there’s money in Europe and we should really be putting our hands up for it and farmers, it seems to me, can benefit to a far greater degree than they have been in the past with the various eco-schemes in the two pillars,” he said.
Oonagh Duggan, head of advocacy with BirdWatch Ireland, told the committee an estimate of between 2% and 5% of the €9.8bn Irish CAP budget will be spent on effective measures for biodiversity — “which is very weak”.
Ireland’s CAP strategic plan includes some improvements for farmland biodiversity — “but it is not an emergency response”, she said.
“Much greater support and targeting of actions and funding is needed on all farmland especially high nature value farmland and pulling the brakes on the intensification model,” said Ms Duggan. “Underpinning the CAP throughout is a requirement to adhere to national and EU environmental law.
“The most common breach of cross-compliance is the Nitrates and Water Framework Directive.
“We really need stronger education and awareness campaigns of environmental law and its enforcement.”
'Destroying a vital asset'
Alan Moore told the meeting that “contrary to previous teaching and advice”, it is now accepted the net economic, climate, biodiversity, and social benefits of hedgerows on farms “fully justify the land that they occupy”.
“Despite these benefits, 2,000-6,000km of hedgerows are still being removed annually in Ireland,” he said.
“This means that on our watch, a resource that is vital for so many reasons is being lost at a huge rate. We are literally grubbing up and destroying a vital asset.”
Good quality hedgerows are a “vital habitat” for animals, bird and insect species, particularly pollinators — which are under “severe threat”.
“Two-thirds of our native birds either feed or nest or both in hedgerows and they are home to over 600 of our 800 flowering plants,” Mr Moore explained.
“Because of our very low forest cover [11% compared to the European average of 40%] hedges play a correspondingly far greater role in our biodiversity.
“Management techniques are critically important to biodiversity in hedgerows.”
Mr Moore outlined how hedgerows have “no direct protection under current law”, an area in which Hedgerows Ireland is seeking changes.
“Indirect protection only is provided during the nesting season under Section 40 of the Wildlife Act,” he said.
“In practice, this legislation is very unwieldy, has many exemptions, and provides no protection out of the so-called ‘closed season’ and in fact, is considered to be in breach of the EU Birds Directive.”
He said that under cross-compliance, if a farmer takes out a hedgerow, they are supposed to plant an equivalent length before removal to continue to receive basic payments. However, new hedges take 20 to 25 years to reach the same carbon and biodiversity values as an established hedge.
Hedgerows Ireland said it has concerns about the “level of oversight of this replanting and also the quality and species diversity of what is being replanted compared with what is being removed”.
A recent study carried out by Shirley Clerkin, heritage officer with Monaghan County Council showed only around 10% of the hedges in Monaghan are in good condition. Excessive cutting, herbicide, and fertiliser use were among the main issues, as well as neglect and lack of rejuvenation.
Mr Moore said there are currently no hedge management certification courses running, and his group is calling for them to be reintroduced — and for there to be a requirement that hedge-cutting contractors complete these. He said the group “strongly recommend” farmers are paid for good quality hedgerows, and he does not “foresee extra paperwork and extra difficulty from it”.
Value put on hedgerows
Donal Sheehan, a dairy farmer in east Cork and project manager of the BRIDE project, an agri-environment project based in the River Bride catchment, said he is “very aware of the paperwork that’s involved in farming nowadays and especially for a generation that may not be used to it”.
He told the committee that farmers are “perceived as being the destroyers of the environment, and you can’t blame farmers”.
“This is the price of cheap food production, where habitats are being removed purely to increase food production,” he said.
“Until there is some sort of protection and some sort of value put on our hedgerows and all other natural habitats, this will continue.”
For the results-based payment, Shirley Clerkin said that if a farmer’s hedge is wide, bigger, absorbing more carbon, provides more species, and provides livestock shelter, then the payment should be higher.
“If you think about your heart; it’s not going to function without your arteries, and it’s the same for nature, the other habitats attached to the hedgerows aren’t going to function, they’re going to get smaller and smaller without our hedgerows,” Ms Clerkin said.
She said that there’s a “huge opportunity” for the farming sector to contribute to biodiversity in Ireland, “very simply by changing the management practices of their hedgerows”.
Mr Moore said that the EPA estimates that there are up to 700,000km of hedgerow in Ireland, but much of it is in “poor condition”, he said.
Due to a lack of native woodland in this country, hedgerows are “relatively more important” here than compared to other countries.
“We have better hedgerows than continental Europe, but compared to the UK, we’re not doing so well.”
Representatives of the Environmental Pillar also attended the meeting, who said that the new CAP and other Government policies “will regrettably fail to address the defining social and environmental issues of our time because ultimately, they aren’t designed to”.
Fintan Kelly, agriculture and land use policy and advocacy officer at the Environmental Pillar said that as the main financing mechanism “underpinning the social, economic and environmental wellbeing of rural Ireland, it is essential that supports are credible, targeted and measurable”.
“Many of the proposed actions are not ambitious enough or targeted enough to deliver the degree of change that is needed,” Mr Kelly said. “The level of ambition within the CAP Strategic Plan is not aligned with the level of ambition highlighted in various overarching strategies that span the same timeframe.
“CAP is supposed to be the vehicle but it isn’t clear what the roadmap or the destination is.”
Mr Kelly said that notwithstanding positive environmental interventions such as Ireland’s “world-class results-based agri-environmental schemes”, successive CAPs have, “by and large, failed to meet head-on our biodiversity and climate crises or the socioeconomic crisis facing many farms”.
