Sir, - Does the IFA president, Tom Parlon, expect us to take him seriously (The Irish Times, December 6th) when he claims that EU subsidies to his members are required to combat the WTO "threat to our system of food production and environmental standards"?
Does he think that the anglers of Ireland suffer from amnesia, and have forgotten last year's appalling slurry incidents? Agriculture is by far our biggest polluter. Lough Sheelin and many other lakes and rivers, are vivid testimony. The idea that this industry, as presently constituted, is the guardian of our environment is laughable.
What is going on?
Mr Parlon is quoting the EU's latest line of defence of the billions of pounds of subsidies to European farmers. The food industry, it is claimed, has several other functions apart from producing food - protecting wildlife, the environment, the countryside, and rural society in general. The bureaucrats call it "multifunctionality".
Nobody would disagree that our farmers (who are having a particularly tough time at present) are a crucial part of the rural landscape and of society as a whole, or that our countryside and wildlife need to be properly cared for. But it is quite disingenuous - and ultimately self-defeating - to argue that the baroque system of EU grants and subsidies is the best way to achieve this. How, for example, does the special subsidy to guarantee a minimum profit level for sugar factories protect the environment?
Just as the broader social (and economic) benefits of public transport justify a certain level of support from the public purse, so too, quite reasonably, does agriculture. But let us all - farmer and consumer - know clearly what we are paying for. For as well as making life easy for sugar processors, the EU's subsidies are destroying (via export subsidies on surplus food) the livelihoods of some of the world's poorest farmers, in Africa. Would getting rid of this grotesquerie constitute for Mr Parlon and the IFA an "attack on the European family farm structure"? - Yours, etc.,
Dr Brian Scott, Executive director, Oxfam Ireland, Burgh Quay, Dublin 2.