The North American (NA) – European Union (EU) agricultural policy congress was held in Ireland for the first time last week, with the Ulster Farmers’ Union (UFU) playing host to approximately 250 delegates from various farming organisations across the two continents.

The content was mainly dictated by Copa (European farmers’ representative body) and Cogeca (European agri-co-operatives representative body). The main aim of the event seemed to be to provide a forum to discuss common issues of concern for farming leaders from Europe, Canada, Mexico and the US.

The areas discussed included the problem that the general population is increasingly removed from the land, which results in an even greater lack of understanding about what farmers do.

“The increased use of social media leads to even greater misinformation. We must make sure policy decisions are based on fact and science,” said Canadian farmer Ron Bonnett.

In an attempt to raise the priority of agriculture at government level, he said that Canadian farmers have been trying to form alliances with other groups interested in food nutrition, with a view to developing a national food strategy.

“Many elected officials don’t understand agriculture in that way. We must start taking strategic approaches and bring people along with us,” he said.

In Canada, strong domestic support to farmers (for example, they still operate milk quotas) has led to stability within the farming sector, although, in common with the EU, the US and Mexico, government budgets for agriculture are stagnant or falling in real terms each year. This is in contrast to Brazil and China where the trend has been in the other direction.

That leads to the issue of food security, a key policy area farming leaders would like to press upon relevant governments.

Bureaucracy

In his presentation, Copa president and Danish farmer Martin Merrild called on policymakers to stop adding more bureaucracy for farmers and to face the issue of volatility in prices. He suggested that farmers should look at ways of developing co-ops and structures that mirror retailers, to allow them to balance production with demand and prevent farmers continually being the losers within the supply chain.

Speaking the evening before, his Cogeca counterpart, Christian Pees, floated the idea of using the next CAP reform process to focus on introducing measures and using subsidies to manage the effect of volatility on farmers.

However, the issue of subsidy support is one that lacks agreement across the farming organisations, with the Mexican delegate calling for a removal of export subsidies within World Trade Organisation (WTO) countries and a reduction in overall support.

“It is vital to have fair competition,” he said.

In response, Pees outlined the support given by the EU in trade agreements to help developing countries, and called on others to do the same.

He would also like to see more transparency in the market support given by other countries to farmers, and issues such as animal welfare, labour costs and availability of water taken into account in trade negotiations.

The view from Europe is that costs of production on EU farms must also be included in calculations to establish quotas for market access to the EU, and that geographical indicators (such as Armagh Bramley apples and Lough Neagh eels) should be protected.

Farmers look to invest in fertiliser

The final day of the biennial event focused on opportunities and examples of co-operation within the agricultural sector. James Mann, president and CEO of Farmers of North America, detailed how his company set up partnerships and business alliances between farmers to give them more bargaining power with high-cost farm inputs as well as to create efficiencies in distribution systems.

Listen to an interview with James Mann in our podcast below:

Using fertiliser as an example, Mann said that Farmers of North America was working to get farmers to invest in a production facility. This was to lower the cost of fertiliser to levels closer to the cost of producing it.

He said that some fertiliser companies in Canada have profits close to 50% of sales.

“We need to create competition or become involved in markets that make excess profits by finding ways to reduce the cost of production to make farming more profitable,” he said.