IFA requests aid to offset grain harvest losses

Rains of monsoon ferocity in southern areas of the State have resulted in the worst grain harvest in decades, the Irish Farmers' Association has claimed. An IFA delegation met the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, in Dublin yesterday to demand a package of measures to redress the crisis, which it claims has cost farmers £30 million and left half the national crop still in the fields.

Harvest rates are much lower in the counties worst affected - Wexford, Waterford, Cork and south Tipperary - according to the association, which has asked the Government to bring forward area aid payments due under the CAP reform package.

The Minister is understood to have told the delegation that the necessary arrangements with Brussels would make it impossible to secure the payments any earlier than the scheduled date of October 16th, but he promised to ensure that the vast majority of payments were made on time.

He also agreed to consider a request from the IFA that the Government should match EU revaluation aid, which compensates farmers for recent revaluations of the green pound. This would cost £3 million.

The Department of Agriculture has agreed to join the IFA in an approach to the lending institutions for a support package to see farmers through the crisis.

At a press conference before the delegation met the Minister, IFA members from the areas worst affected spoke of a "natural disaster" in the south and south-east.

Mr George Williamson, from south Wexford, spoke of the "total abandonment of crops as farmers became disheartened". He said August alone had brought more than one-third of the annual average for rainfall in the area, with the month's normal rain quota falling on a single day, August 3rd.

A Cork farmer, Mr Jack Lynch, said he had baled straw on Monday of last week, but had seen "all those bales floating down the river on Wednesday". Mr Jim O'Regan, from Kinsale, reported that most of the harvesting in August had been done at night. He added: "All we're harvesting in Cork is black trash."

The IFA president, Mr John Donnelly, said that farmers accepted the unpredictability of the weather as an occupational hazard, but this was an exceptional situation.

The association's grain chairman, Mr John O'Mahony, said that the farmers' problems came at a time when grain prices were at their lowest since the mid-1970s. He also complained that grain merchants were exploiting the situation, saying that, after normal costs were deducted, there was an unexplained price deficit of £15 a tonne. He called on the Government to investigate grain pricing as a matter of urgency.