European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development Phil Hogan dominated the airwaves early this week with his robust views on the direction of Brexit widely reported across mainstream media. He reflected the prevailing and indeed growing mood of impatience in Brussels as Britain prepares to trigger Article 50, which is the beginning of the exit process.

The British position remains unclear, although as time passes it gets more difficult to see how continued membership of the single market can be reconciled with the UK wanting complete control of its immigration policy and retaking control of the courts.

The Irish Government has been trying to ride both horses up to this point, staying close to the UK given our historic and trading links while maintaining a strong parallel allegiance to the EU. Now the Commissioner is expressing the view that the time has come for Ireland to make the call and get firmly under the EU umbrella as the beginning of negotiations is just weeks away. From a Brussels perspective, that makes perfect sense. However, given Ireland’s unique level of exposure to the UK market, significantly more than anyone else in Europe, it isn’t as simple as putting on the EU jersey.

After all, new members states including Ireland, when it joined, had a transition period of a decade or more before accessing full EU benefits, a corresponding period is required to reflect the exit of a member that happens to be Ireland’s most significant trading partner.

Taskforce report goes to committee

Meanwhile, back at the day job, the commissioner presented the proposals of his Agricultural Markets Taskforce to the agriculture committee of the EU Parliament this week. Given the support for regulation of agri markets beyond the farm gate among MEPs – they voted in favour by 600 votes to 38 last June – this was never going to be a hostile outing for the Commissioner.

Irish MEPs Matt Carty and Luke Flanagan contributed to the debate in a wider sense on price volatility likely to continue and farmer profitability being the key to accessing finance from traditional sources, rather than creating alternative finance for unprofitable farming.

Mairead McGuinness, who was the driver of the motion on the issue of unfair trading practices through the EU Parliament, suggested that as well as the Competition Commission and Internal Market Commission, this issue was also relevant to the Environment Commission from a farmer sustainability perspective. The Commissioner deflected this suggestion saying that a consensus needs to be built in the Commission through persuasion to gain support for the taskforce report to bring forward legislation and reminded everyone that it is very much in the work programme for 2017.

Forceful contributions were made by the England and Wales NFU president Meurig Raymond who was part of a special panel of experts assembled by the committee and IFA president Joe Healy, who was also invited to contribute.

Raymond singled out the need to legislate for market transparency as the key to delivering the other elements of the report. He claimed there was a black hole in information between when produce left the farm gate until it reached the supermarket shelf. Overall, the report should act as a strong call to policymakers.

IFA president Joe Healy who was in attendance at the meeting was also given the opportunity address the taskforce report. He welcomed it and called for a road map to implementation. Like his NFU counterpart, he strongly called for transparency through mandatory price reporting on meat, dairy, fruit and vegetables to provide reliable data on prices and margins outside the farm gate. He summed up by saying that 21m EU farmers produce food for 500m EU consumers but were selling into just 110 concentrated buying desks.

The outing to the agriculture committee of the EU Parliament on Brexit was about as straightforward as it could be for the commissioner. In the afternoon session, there was only one strongly dissenting voice, Stuart Agnew, the British MEP from the pro-Brexit UKIP party. However, work begins in earnest now as the commissioner has to persuade his commission colleagues to support the proposals of the taskforce report which will be a greater challenge.