The coming year will be a nervous one for the Irish farm and food industries.

As the US and Britain consider pushing up barriers to trade, smaller players like Ireland will need to use their brains as never before, writes Kyran Fitzgerald.

As the EU moves to pay dairy farmers to produce less, Irish CAP expert Alan Matthews said the measure could raise EU dairy farm incomes in the last quarter of the year by as much as €289m.

As if the Brexit threat to our food industry wasn’t bad enough, the EU will soon start paying farmers to produce less.

EU agriculture expert Alan Matthews predicts that tariffs will be temporarily re-imposed on trade between the UK and the EU for the first time in more than 40 years, when the Brexit process is completed.

On July 18, European commissioner for agriculture and rural development Phil Hogan will present a new EU dairy support package to the council of agriculture ministers.

Irish dairy co-ops reckon the voluntary milk supply reductions given the green light by the European Commission won’t succeed — even if farmers are paid 10c per litre of milk volume reduced, as suggested last week by ICMSA.

France has elected to pay its dairy farmers a coupled premium of between €34 and €86 per cow — despite leading calls to curtail the EU milk supply.

A new EU scheme allowing dairy farmers to agree milk production cuts is unlikely to affect the main flush of EU milk production this spring.

Not too many people are in farming for the money. And they are certainly not in it for a steady income.

One of the major European dairies, FrieslandCampina, recently paid dairy farmers not to increase milk production.

The chair of the new Climate Change Advisory Council has said the group won’t hold back on criticising the Government for failings in tackling carbon emissions.

After their team put eight past Bray it surely can’t be long before Lilywhites supporters start referring to Barcelona as ‘the Spanish Dundalk’.

As CAP talks edge ahead, the picture looks less ambitious and changes in who gets what, and how much they get, will be less radical than envisaged, writes Europe Correspondent Ann Cahill