Farmers in the Belfast Hills, who face being excluded from future payments for Less Favoured Areas (LFA), have called on DARD to consider using a different approach when mapping new Areas of Natural Constraint (ANC).

Much of the Belfast Hills is currently classified as Severely Disadvantaged Area (SDA), but under the criteria suggested by DARD to fine-tune ANC designation, most of the land would drop out.

The problem relates to the suggested use of standard output (the monetary value of agricultural output/ha) in either an electoral ward or townland, to fine-tune the maps.

In the case of the Belfast Hills, there are a number of intensive farms which currently lie outside the SDA, but are part of the electoral ward area.

They act to push up the standard output/ha for the whole electoral ward above the threshold, meaning the entire area potentially misses out.

It is not a problem unique to Belfast Hills, with hill land in various parts across NI also set to be excluded for the same reason.

At present, around 720,000ha of land in NI is classified as LFA, of which approximately 440,000ha is designated as SDA.

Under the latest proposals from DARD, the new ANC area could be anywhere between 350,000 and 490,000ha. Most land in the Disadvantaged Area (DA) drops out, as well as some SDA land.

“If it comes in, it will create a two-tier hill farming sector. We reckon up to 20,000 acres of hill land in this area will no longer be classified as disadvantaged,” a spokesperson for Belfast Hill farmers told the Irish Farmers Journal.

Options

The guidance from the European Commission on how to fine-tune new ANC maps outlines a number of options that DARD could use, which include measurements based on livestock density, land productivity or standard output.

The Department argues that the most comprehensive set of data it holds relates to measurement of standard output from farms.

The new ANC designation must be in place by 1 January 2018 at the latest, but this is complicated by a proposal from DARD, late last year, to move future ANC payments from Pillar II of CAP (Rural Development Programme) into Pillar I (Direct Payments), starting in 2015.

If that is to happen, DARD must notify European Commission by 1 August 2014. It would then take 5% of all direct payments to fund the scheme.

This change in LFA support now seems highly unlikely given the problems getting ANC maps finalised, but it is a decision that can be reviewed in 2016.

For the time being, it looks as though the current LFA designations will remain in place, with a payment continuing to be made from Pillar II.

“We need to take time to examine why so much hill land could be excluded from future ANC designation,” said the spokesperson for Belfast Hill farmers.

Meanwhile, at the Stormont Agriculture Committee last month, DARD’s director of policy and economics, Norman Fulton, told MLAs that the designation of ANCs was “very much still a work in progress”.