IRELAND'S 15,000 cereal farmers were paid up to £50 million a year in excess EU compensation between 1993 and 1997, according to figures from the British Ministry of Agriculture.
The unpublished MAFF report, circulated to EU ministries and the Commission as part of the British campaign for the reform of cereals payments system and of the CAP, argues that in the period total arable aid overpayments to EU farmers totalled £13.6 billion. The bulk of overpayments, running into billions of pounds, were made to four countries - Italy, Germany, France and the UK.
The case of durum wheat, grown mainly in Italy for pasta, is particularly notable, amounting to £4 billion of the total.
A spokesman for the Department of Agriculture yesterday said the British believe that without the subsidy system they can dominate the cereals market because of huge economies of scale in the 400 hectare farms of East Anglia. Only some 3,000 Irish producers would operate on a large scale basis and smaller farmers would have received payments of not much more than £1,500 per person, he said.
The compensation payments to farmers arose because the Union was seeking to cushion farmers incomes from the gradual reduction in cereal support prices (intervention prices) in the years after the CAP reforms of 1993. Expected falls in cereal prices in large measure never happened but the compensation payments continued.
