Last chance to make CAP relevant again

Ireland is set to assume the presidency of the EU for a six-month period beginning on July 1 and ending on December 31. It seems very fair to assume that the international situation will not have resumed any degree of calm by the time we get to sit in that big seat. No doubt, there will be a chorus of voices and groups demanding that Ireland elevates their own ‘pet’ projects and causes. In the midst of all this noise, it is the ICMSA’s intention to push – and push as hard as we can – on the issue of the next Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
It’s probably not the most fashionable or ‘of the moment’ issue, but it is, undoubtedly, the issue that will have the most direct influence, for good or bad, on the family farms we represent and on the rural districts of which they are the backbone.

It is simply a matter of fact to observe that for a whole variety of reasons, the issue of what Ireland wants from the next CAP has not been given the attention it requires. It is an area of dizzying complexity but one that is, nevertheless, capable of being reduced to a few simple principles and the most notable principles that ICMSA wants front and centre is: a) the budget for the next CAP must be adequate; and b) it is beyond time that payments under CAP were inflation-linked. There are obviously other specific areas that we will be urging the Irish Government to impress upon the European Commission. Not least of those will be the laughably misnamed ‘simplification’ agenda that has achieved notoriety by managing the difficult task of making an already confusing system even more confusing under the guise of making it simpler.  

Setting out our stall

Recently, the ICMSA met both Piotr Serafin, European Commissioner for Budget and Christophe Hansen, European Commissioner for Agriculture and Food, and we laid out to them plainly that we will be campaigning – both through our domestic Irish forums and avenues and through our membership of European Milk Board (EMB) – that the absolutely overriding priority must be to secure an adequate CAP budget under the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) negotiations during 2026  and that this budget must, as a bare minimum, reflect the fact that inflation on farm inputs has drastically reduced the already inadequate real spending power of the direct supports. Again, this is just a fact and cannot be seriously disputed by any serious observer.
At that meeting, we also told both commissioners that the EU continuing to invent new environmental stipulations in the expectation that they would be funded out of the CAP budget had been a disaster and it was high time that we remembered that CAP had originally been conceived as a way of ensuring security of affordable food for the populations of the great European cities. Given the global uncertainty today, this original objective needs to move up the agenda very smartly.
In the kind of highly unstable international situation, we see around us now, it might be time to concentrate on securing the supply of food, and parking the more fringe environmental issues and green bolt-ons until a degree of stability and predictability allows us that luxury.   

Too much

We firmly believe that the current CAP is already expected to do too much from a policy perspective and, as a result, is failing in its primary function of delivering a sustainable income to the farmers producing high quality food daily. The CAP must refocus on the issue of sustainable farm incomes that will help sustainable food production. That must be the focus of the next CAP, and the aim must be moving farmers to a position where they can earn incomes in line with other sectors of the economy.  These are realisable aims that can be achieved through a strong index linked budget with policies focussed on those producing high quality food. 

The current budget proposal from the EU Commission is hopelessly inadequate and will have to be revised substantially upwards. That is ICMSA’s ‘starting point’ and we will do everything in our power to ensure that it is Ireland’s starting point on July 1.