Brace yourself for outrage

There’s something very instructive about the way that the summer drought was dealt with in the media in terms of the way it affected farming and, most particularly, the way its likely effects were presented. Without meaning to do an injustice to our media, we can summarise this as: “Yeah, okay, so it’s been hard for farmers to grow their crops and volumes are down due to the lack of rain and extreme heat, but (sudden note of urgency and anxiety) what does this mean for us non-farmers in terms of the prices we might have to pay for our food?”

If production costs go up...

The ICMSA took a decision some 15 years ago that it would, never again, apologise for announcing – early and often – that if the costs of producing food went up, it would begin lobbying immediately for an increase in farmer price to cover the increased costs of production. It’s nearly amusing to note the astonishment in the voices and reactions of politicians and commentators to our quiet insistence that if the costs of producing milk and beef go up, then we farmers must be able to pass those costs directly along – and it is up to others along the supply chain to decide whether they want to absorb the increased costs or pass them along in turn to their customers. 

It’s a choice for the factories, the processors, or the supermarkets. But the days when they didn’t have to make that choice because the farmers would simply have to ‘take the hit’ for everybody else, must be a thing of the past. Forever.

Here we go again

I’m saying this again at the end of August because we are already set up for another instalment of Ireland’s long-running soap opera, and the big question: ‘Will all this farming stuff increase the costs of food at consumer level?’ The cost of energy is up. The cost of fuel is up. The cost of fertiliser is up. The cost of labour is up. That means – it has to mean – that the cost of producing food is up, and we (farmers) are not picking up those increased costs anymore. After decades of doing so, farmers are no longer willing to financially ‘take one for the team’ and as the relative effect of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments declines, farmers are increasingly demanding that they receive the real costs of producing food.  They can’t go on producing food and getting a price that doesn’t even cover the costs of that production – as our members have been doing for almost a year now with milk production.

Increase or decrease?

But it’s not just milk and it’s not just 2026 and it’s not just dairy farmers. Everywhere you look in farming and primary food production, whenever successive Irish governments or the EU have been faced with a choice between doing something that will increase the costs of producing food, or lower those costs, they will inevitably choose the former. Every action they take, every strategic objective they set out, and every directive all have one underlying effect: they increase the costs of producing that food. This summer’s drought is just going to magnify a problem that has been a very long time in incubation; if we keep on heaping restrictions on the farmers producing our food and if we keep on making it costly and financially unworkable, then the supply of food drops and the price to consumers goes up. There were squeals of panic two and three years ago in the face of what people considered shocking inflation. I’d advise everyone to brace themselves for this winter and into next year – and I’d specifically advise politicians to grasp the fact that there’s a conveyor belt running from our farms to consumers’ fridges. The farmers are performing the most important actions: producing the food and placing it on the start of the conveyor belt. Everyone else along the conveyor belt is just ‘tweaking’ or processing slightly the essential food that the farmers have put there. Policy has to start reflecting the importance of who’s doing what along the conveyer belt from farm to fridge.