Any analysis on the impact of new Common Agricultural Policy regulations is only a draft until final decisions are made in the EU, Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed has said. But MEP Mairead McGuinness says that any impact assessment carried out by the Department should be made available to help inform voting decisions.

“Ahead of the [agriculture] committee's vote, I wrote to Minister Creed urging him to carry out an impact assessment on how implementation of convergence of payments would impact on a range of family farms. It’s critically important that we know the impact of such a move,” she said.

But Minister Creed has said that all direct payment measures are inextricably linked to each other.

“This means that each time one of the elements is changed, each of the other elements also must change. As a result, any analysis, including analysis on convergence, only remains current until one of the elements changes.This state of flux is likely to continue until the regulations are fully developed, at which time detailed analyses will be completed to fully address the impact on farmers in Ireland of CAP 2020,” he said.

The draft legislative proposals for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post-2020 were launched by European Commissioner for Agriculture Phil Hogan on 1 June 2018. The proposals involve significant changes to the the distribution of direct payments among farmers and the increasing environmental conditionality attaching to such payments. It also gives more powers to each of the member states to allocate payments where needed.

Work is currently under way in the Department of Agriculture to analyse the impact of changes to direct payments in the draft regulations.

“Preliminary modelling exercises have been carried out and the results of these analyses are currently being reviewed and revised to take account of the most recently available data,” Creed said.

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