Most cattle farmers want a limit of €50,000 or lower imposed on the annual payments any individual farmer can claim in farm income support in the next CAP.
Some 51% of suckler farmers and an exact half of beef finishers surveyed by the Irish Farmers Journal indicated that income supports should top out at €50,000 per farmer per year, while roughly another fifth of farmers in each of these sectors said the limit should lie between €50,000 and €75,000.
Just 38% of tillage farmers said a limit of €50,000 or lower should be imposed, while the equivalent results from the dairy and sheep sectors came in at a respective 46% and 45%.
Across all sectors, one in fourteen respondents stated that they favoured no limit on claiming CAP payments, 4% said the limit should be set at €150,00, 2% opted for a €125,000 cap and the option of a limit of €125,000 was picked by one in five farmers, as was €100,000.
The results come amid ongoing debate around CAP payments heading to beneficiaries which include the royalty of Arab states and billionaire business interests.
The debate comes after the latest list of CAP beneficiaries showed that factors like uncapped eco-scheme payments and farm partnership arrangements have seen the CAP payments of a handful of Ireland’s largest farms grow in size, despite the introduction of mechanisms intended to distribute funds more evenly across the sector.
SHARING OPTIONS