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The Northern Ireland Institute of Agri-Science conference (NIIAS) held its ‘‘Brexit– making it work for NI agri food” conference last week.
During a question-and-answer session, New Zealand native David Porter warned that a swift removal of direct support payments after Brexit would have severe consequences for farming and the rural society in NI.
He spoke from his own experience of how the removal of farm subsidies in New Zealand in 1984 affected his family’s arable and sheep farm in Timaru in the South Island.
Communities devastated
He said that average incomes dropped by a third after the six-month transition to subsidy-free farming. A loan that David’s brother had taken out for land purchased the previous year had to go to interest-only payments.
“We nearly lost the lot. Just when he should have been finishing paying it off about 25 years later, he was actually only then in a position to start to make the payments,” he told NIIAS members.
“Not only for farming but for the support industries and processing industries, everything was really tough. Small towns and villages were completely devastated,” he said.
He added that a similar scenario for NI farming, as proposed by some Brexiteers, would be worse as debt levels on NI farms are much higher than they were in New Zealand in the 1980s.
“There is not a lot of money being made in agriculture [in NI] anyway and if you take away subsidies that is just going to exacerbate the situation. Some call it hard medicine, I call it brutal,” David said.
Listen to the podcast with David below:
Listen to "How farming in New Zealand survived post-subsidies" on Spreaker.
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