Farmers call for full €280m aid package

IRISH farmers would need the entire €280 million aid package on offer to EU dairy farmers this year to bring them back to profit, not the €11m they stand to receive, according to a farmers’ representative.

The €11m package will mean about a half cent per litre of milk, or an average of €600 for every Irish dairy farmer.

Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said she hoped the money would mean Europe’s farmers would stop spilling millions of litres of milk in protest and warned there was nothing left in the EU’s budget.

However, the gesture had the opposite effect, as thousands of farmers and their tractors, mainly from France and Germany, encircled the agriculture ministers’ meeting in Luxembourg making it impossible for them to enter or leave the building.

ICMSA president Jackie Cahill said the sum wastotally inadequate.

“Irish farmers would need the full €280m to put them back into profit for this year. This is just throwing diesel on the fire. It shows the commission is totally out of touch with the farmers out there,” he said.

The only solution was to regulate production and in this way ensure farmers get a fair price for their milk, Mr Cahill said.

This is in line with the view of European Milk Board, to which the ICMSA is affiliated, and which has been organising the mass protests for months.

IFA president Padraig Walshe welcomed the financial support but disagreed that a reintroduction of quotas would help. “If you limit production the market will be flooded with milk from abroad. It could only work if you introduced tariffs to limit imports,” he said but added it would cause problems with the WTO.

He called on the commission to assist tillage, beef and pigmeat producers, saying they are all in a disastrous economic state because imports from all over the world were decimating farm family incomes across Europe.

Agriculture Minister Brendan Smith defended the commission’s package and said it was in addition to €600m in market support measures this year also.

He said that the agreement, to continue intervention to 2011 and not to release stocks from intervention while prices are recovering, was very important for Irish farmers.

But Ireland was not going to buy up additional quota from farmers – which the commission said it would allow countries to do if they wished in this difficult period. Mr Smith said Irish farmers could produce more milk, as the country is 9% under quota at present.

Ms Fischer Boel said the market is improving and prices are 18% higher than intervention price, adding that there was always a lag between the price increasing on the market and it reaching the farmer.

Milk prices have dropped by up to 30% in the past year as consumers worldwide reduced their consumption and the big processors and supermarkets cut the prices they paid.