A farm leader yesterday described as a "social scandal" the revelation that over 40 per cent of Common Agricultural Policy payments had gone to only 4 per cent of Irish farmers.
Mr Albert Thompson, the chairman of the Irish Cattlemen and Stockowners' Association, which represents drystock farmers, was commenting on the EU Court of Auditors' report, published yesterday.
He said that he had been pointing this out since the 1992 reform of the CAP by Mr Ray MacSharry, but the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, had not listened.
"Every week we see our incomes eroded and they are now only 39 per cent of what they were in 1973", Mr Thompson said. "If drystock farming is not to be consigned to the history books as a quaint farming practice that died out between 1992 and the year 2000, then all drystock farmers will have to voice their opinion today, as tomorrow will be too late.
"The EU figure for the average farmer subsidy was £9,000 per annum, whereas the drystock farmer's average income is only £5,000. If these statistics are correct, then the 100,000 drystock farmers have lost out on £400 million that has been redistributed to other farming sectors."
The Labour Party's spokesman on agriculture, Mr Willie Penrose, said that the figures published by the EU's audit service should not mask the fact that the largest recipients of these supports were rich farmers.
"There is no doubt that Irish agriculture has benefited greatly from EU supports, but unfortunately these supports have been poorly targeted. As it stands, current figures suggest that 70 per cent of EU farm supports go to 30 per cent of farmers", he said.
"At the other end of the scale, we have thousands of farmers on very low incomes, particularly those in the drystock sector, who are not in receipt of any significant income supports from the EU. It is these farmers who are forming part of the annual exodus from agriculture and who are finding it difficult to get their sons and daughters interested in carrying on the family farms."
Calling for a new approach to the distribution of CAP supports, Mr Penrose said that they should be directed towards low-income farmers who do not have the acreage or the quality of land to produce high yields.
An Irish Farmers' Association spokesman said that politicians had driven farmers down the road of direct payments by cutting producer prices. He claimed that prices had been cut below the cost of production to a point where some of the direct payments were going towards the costs of production. He cited the case of beef farming, where direct payments last year had "accounted for 105 per cent of income on cattle farms".
The spokesman pointed out that Ireland's share of the CAP budget had been in the range of 4 to 5 per cent. This was not excessive given that Ireland's share of the EU's overall beef and milk production was 7 per cent and 4 per cent, respectively.
He said that, because of our high level of self-sufficiency and our distance from EU consumers, we had a relatively high dependence on export refunds and intervention.
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