Current Edition: 15 March 2003
News
Fischler freezes out young farmers
By Des Maguire and Paul Mooney
|
The barriers to young people entering farming will be raised even higher under the Fischler proposals for the Mid Term Review of the CAP, it emerged this week.
Senior Department of Agriculture officials have now confirmed at a series of technical briefings that young people will face new and serious restrictions when attempting to take up farming. |
Alan Murphy adjusts his plough while ploughing stubbles for Optic spring barley on Willie Masterson's farm at Clohamon, Bunclody, Co Wexford.
|
Where young farmers did not actively farm in each one of the three reference years 2000, 2001 and 2002 they will receive entitlements for only one third of the direct aid they received.
This would hit young people who farmed in only one or two of these reference years.
These young farmers would have to apply to the national reserve for additional entitlements. But at only 1% the national reserve will be very limited.
In addition, clarification is still needed on the right that young farmers will have to inherit entitlements after the reference years, although such rights are expected to be fully transferable.
These revelations have provoked fury among organisations representing young farmers.
"These proposals are outrageous and fly in the face of logic in that the people they will inhibit most, are the very ones who are hoping to farm in the future,'' Macra na Feirme president Seamus Phelan said.
Establishment of a 1% national reserve would be totally insignificant in accommodating young progressive farmers because of the private market trading of the entitlements, he claimed.
"The reserve would not even be sufficient to deal with the anomalies, which would created with the transition to an area based system and there was little prospect for any ongoing reserve for new entrants which would have to be an essential element of any sustainable support system.
"One has just to take a look at the current suckler cow trading system over the past number of years where reserve volumes have continuously dropped to a point where it is hardly worth a new entrant's time applying to the reserve,'' he said.
Phelan said he has written to Commissioner Fischler and Agriculture Minister Joe Walsh insisting these anomalies be removed and that young farmers are properly accommodated.
