Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) president Tim Cullinan is set to meet with a representative of the European Commission’s DG Environment later this month to discuss the regulation it has drafted that would see over 100,000ha of drained peatlands under agricultural use rewet in Ireland over the coming years.

The IFA has confirmed to the Irish Farmers Journal that it had seen the Commission’s proposal for the nature restoration law and that it had initially proposed to meet with the DG Environment’s officials on 24 February.

This was the week that the Irish Farmers Journal published details of the Commission’s plans for legally-binding nature restoration targets across both designated and non-designated farmland.

Farmer compensation

The IFA emphasised the need for funds to be delivered to farmers rewetting agricultural land to cover the full costs of rewetting works, as well as to compensate farmers for the decreased capacity of the farmland to grow grass.

“The earning capacity of the land, as well as land value, will be significantly reduced unless farmers are properly compensated for the benefits of restoration,” the IFA has said.

The body also called for “new funding mechanisms” to be established to deliver these supports, stating the regulation itself pointed towards a lack of financing as one of the hindering factors for environmental restoration in the past.

No member state-specific costings have yet been seen by the IFA.

“The annex with the cost to member states is unavailable at this point. There is no data available showing the financial benefits to those impacted. The Commission have said this is not measurable,” the IFA added.

Meetings in Europe

COPA – the EU-level farm organisation to which the IFA is affiliated – had discussed the proposals with the director of natural capital at DG Environment Humberto Delgado Rosa, according to the IFA.

It is understood that Cullinan attended this meeting, along with the heads of other European farm groups, where details of the nature restoration document were discussed.

Separately, a delegation from COPA met with the chief of DG Environment’s natural capital and ecosystem health to communicate to Brussels the key farmer issues with the law’s “stringent targets”.