Government must prioritise specific policy issues

The ICMSA met Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Martin Heydon, last month and had very useful discussions on the most pressing issues facing Irish farmers at this mid-point in the year. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer scale and complexity of the challenges facing us and, while everyone will have their own opinion about which issues constitute the most critical, ICMSA has the ‘luxury of consistency’. What I mean by that is, from the very instant the association was founded, it identified ensuring viable and comparable farmer income as the single most important issue on which to focus its efforts. The logic of the ICMSA founders was simple and indisputable: if families cannot make a living or support themselves from full-time farming, then all other questions around farming become irrelevant. 

Main consideration

From my earliest involvement with the ICMSA – more years ago now than I care to remember – it was impressed upon me that the paramount consideration always had to be the income of farm families. The first question that ICMSA representatives considered was this: was any given proposal likely to increase that income or decrease it? If we ask that question of the present scenario, we‘d get a very sobering answer. We see a situation where milk and beef prices are still below the cost of production, input costs are still at an excessively high level, and a frankly mystifying reluctance on the part of officialdom to cut through the fog and noise and just concentrate on getting to grips with the two most obvious requirements: get farmer prices up and get farmer costs down. 

What rubs salt in the inactivity wound is the fact that – certainly as regards milk price – there’s a perfectly good policy ‘tool’ that we know would work almost instantly in terms of giving dairy markets an upward shock. The European Milk Board (EMB) has been calling for an EU-wide voluntary milk reduction scheme for several months now. It was tried once before in 2016 and worked perfectly in that it signalled a measured reduction in milk supplies that brought the buyers immediately back into the market and ‘buying forward’. The effects were positive and almost instantaneous. The ICMSA and our sister organisations organisations from across the EU in the EMB see absolutely no reason why it would not work with equal effect and speed 10 years later.

CAP calls and TB

On the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2027, the ICMSA repeated its calls for an increased budget and for direct supports to be targeted at food producers. While we welcomed Minister Heydon’s commitment to simplification of the process, we told him that had to mean simplification for the farmers – not the civil servants and administrators.
In relation to TB, we told the minister that the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine’s communications around the new requirements to farmers had been slipshod and hit-and-miss, and that this had contributed greatly to the total chaos that had marked the introduction of the new rules. Certain matters remained unaddressed: compensation ceilings needed to be raised, and the losses suffered by farmers only allowed to sell animals to controlled finishing units had to be looked at.

Nitrates action

We urged the minister to roll out a plan of action on nitrates that would give some degree of predictability to the farmers concerned. Much attention, we told him, would focus on the proposed simplification of the nitrates directive in the context of the Irish system of production. On the subject of reconciling Irish and EU policy, we noted that we now have an EU fertiliser plan promoting EU self-sufficiency in fertiliser based on CAN, a product whose use our own Government is actively discouraging. To be fair to farmers, and simple consistency, this is a contradiction that must be resolved.