The European Commission is considering a dramatic shift in farm policy that would place the interests of consumers ahead of producers and change the way farmers are subsidised.
The Food Safety Commissioner, Mr David Byrne, and the Agriculture Commissioner, Mr Franz Fischler, have started preliminary discussions aimed at making agriculture subsidies promote quality rather than quantity, even if it means higher prices for consumers.
The move comes after Germany's centre-left government announced its intention to discourage intensive farming and promote the production of organic produce.
Germany's change of policy, which has outraged farmers, followed the resignation this week of the country's agriculture and health ministers over their handling of the BSE crisis.
In an interview with The Irish Times, Mr Byrne said the Commission did not plan to stop supporting farmers but that the nature of EU support for agriculture could change.
"They deserve and are entitled to be properly looked after. But if there are going to be shifts and changes of emphasis for the consumers, this requires there to be a greater emphasis on questions relating to food safety. There have to be adjustments and these adjustments might be fairly significant."
The Commissioner acknowledged that moving away from some intensive farming practices and an end to subsidies based on quantity could mean higher food prices in the shops. But he believed that consumers were prepared to pay more if they felt confident that their food was safe.
Meanwhile, the Irish Meat Association, which represents the meat plants, had its application to Brussels to put 2,000 tonnes of Irish beef into intervention rejected by the EU Beef Management Committee.
The application highlighted the Irish Meat Association's unhappiness with the EU Slaughter for Destruction Scheme and its search for an alternative to it in the absence of strong commercial markets for beef.
Mr John Smith of the IMA said while factories would operate the destruction scheme, its preference was to seek more Government assistance to have commercial markets opened and to sell BSE-free tested beef to those markets.
The president of the Irish Farmers' Association, Mr Tom Parlon, said he feared the factories were attempting to talk down the 90p per lb base price being paid to farmers and reminded them that in the week before the destruction scheme came into force, they were paying farmers prices as low as 77p per lb.
