EU AGRICULTURE commissioner Dacian Ciolos has claimed that Irish farmers have nothing to fear from the reform of Europe’s common agricultural policy (Cap), a process which threatens to cut their income.
However, Mr Ciolos also raised the prospect of new caps being placed on payments to the biggest beneficiaries of the policy, saying: “there is a limit to the extent that larger farms can provide public goods”.
With European countries across the board under acute fiscal strain, the EU’s €59 billion annual allocation for agriculture and rural development is set to come under pressure in a looming renegotiation of its overall budget.
The commissioner implicitly acknowledged such pressure, saying the economic crisis would: “limit the capacity of member states to ensure or to increase” the wider EU budget.
The talks are viewed with apprehension in Government circles, where it is acknowledged that retaining Ireland’s €1.8 billion share of the budget will be hard.
An EU commission document leaked some months ago pointed to the likelihood of a “significant” reduction in agriculture spending to free up money for new priorities. Last evening in Brussels, however, Mr Ciolos suggested the Irish farming community had no reason to view the talks with suspicion.
“I don’t understand why the farmers in Ireland can be afraid about this reform,” he said. He added that Irish farming produced quality products and had a strong environmental footing.
“The reform of Cap will not be a reform against Ireland or against one member state or another,” he said.
The commissioner said that any cap on large payments was not planned in its own right, but may result from new payment criteria.
“We have some level of payments . . . based on the historical reference of production.
“Now the idea is to redefine this level of payment based on other criteria.”
Mr Ciolos was speaking at a conference on Cap reform.
Irish Farmers’ Association president John Bryan complained afterwards that environmentalists present had proposed “ludicrous” policies which would endanger family farms and food production.
The commissioner said it was not yet possible to determine the potential impact on European farming of the reopening of EU trade talks with the Mercusor trade bloc – Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay – but said it was not his priority to accelerate the talks. Irish farmers opposed the reopening of the talks in May because any deal would increase beef imports from Brazil.
In a separate but related development yesterday, European Ombudsman P Nikiforos Diamandouros, criticised the commission for its delay in imposing restrictions on Brazilian beef imports in 2008 in order to deal with risks from foot-and-mouth disease.
However, he rejected a call from a federation of Irish and British farm organisations that the commission should have imposed a complete ban from 2007.
While saying the commission’s arguments against a total ban were convincing, he criticised it for allowing into the union imports from 10,000 unapproved farms between February and March 2008.