DEAR SIR:

European farmers originally signed up to a deal, under the CAP to produce raw product, mostly food, at a price that would ensure the EU consumer had an assured supply of cheap quality food.

But more importantly, this facilitated the processing and exporting of billions of euros worth of food on to the world market at competitive prices. This entailed farmers selling their produce for substantially less money than it cost to produce it on the farm.

But to balance this there was a very significant compensation payment, the Single Farm Payment (SFP), to make up for loss and to provide family farm incomes in line with the industrial wage. As time has passed, farmers have been getting an increasingly raw deal out of this.

More cuts

We are now being threatened with more cuts to the SFP and a whole bunch of new criteria needed to be adhered to before we will get the supports we need to stay in business. It was the message the European Commissioner for Agriculture Phil Hogan was imparting at the meeting in Kilkenny on Friday. But farmers have to be paid to do what is being demanded of them.

In 1980, the CAP used up 73% of the EU budget – in 2015 it was down to 39%. The percentage of the household budget spent on food has halved in that time. I suspect consumers still consider their food expensive. But the portion of the price they pay that goes to the primary producer would shock them if they really knew.

There may be a good reason why UK farmers voted out of Europe. Maybe they realised that the EU supports were not enough anymore and that there were better prospects of getting realistic food prices again outside the EU, especially when the UK has the capacity to consume most if not all of what UK farmers can produce.

Farmers now live with the ridiculous situation where they produce a litre of milk using litres of water worth more on the supermarket shelves than the milk itself. Whereas in 1980 it took 15 finished cattle to pay for a mid-sized farm tractor, it now takes about 50.

It was said a number of times at the meeting on Friday that the processors need the farmers. Of course they do. But if somebody does not wake up soon, there will come a time when farmers can no longer produce. Farmers who still blindly consider their best futures lie in expanding and buying up entitlements will have self-imploded from over-expansion. There will be no upcoming cohort of young farmers trained to do the very specialised job we farmers do.

Let us face reality – the political decision makers in Europe have no intention and no desire to increase the price of food farmers produce. Therefore, there is only one way to keep this whole artificial system running. That is to significantly increase the budget for CAP, with member states increasing their contributions accordingly, so that the single farm payment to farmers can be increased to ensure that farmers can gain a decent living from farming, producing the food for Europe’s thriving food industry to process and sell.

We need our farm leaders to demand a return of the level of compensation we originally signed up to in the CAP deal. We farmers deserve to farm with dignity and command an income commensurate with the level of responsibility we take. If we are ignored we do have options. We might find ourselves considering following the UK farmers lead!