Coupled payments are being actively discussed in the IFA and will not be ruled out in negotiations for the next Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), IFA deputy president Alice Doyle has said.

The deputy IFA president told the Irish Farmers Journal that it kept coming back down to how much money we would have in the next CAP.

“If you couple and you have a small amount of money, and you have to use every animal, or every acre or hectare and you have to couple that, you're going to give everybody very little, so it's going to depend [on] what we have at the end of the day,” she said.

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However, there was a possibility of using coupling in some areas and not in others under the next CAP, Doyle added.

“We don't know where that's going yet, but it's on the table and it's been actively discussed,” she said.

Doyle discussed how coupling in the past served farmers well and then Ireland decoupled, except for tillage.

“Sometimes you move away from something and then you discover that you need to go back to it.”

The deputy president said that everything came back to the overall CAP budget and how it would be divided, highlighting the big hit it had taken with a 24% cut, a loss of €1.8bn.

Active farmer definition

There was no final definition for an active farmer anywhere in Europe yet and it would vary between different member states and also within Ireland, Doyle said.

“We've already seen within Ireland where there's a divergence... as to what some people think it should be, from a 0.1 to a 1.0 LU/ha,” Doyle added.

She said if a farmer was actively producing food, they had to be looked after.

She spoke about how there would be new ways of farming in the future, that things were changing and there would be a mix of full-time, specialist and part-time farmers, which was already happening across the country.

“If they're producing food and they're doing it in a good way, I think you cannot say they should be exempt from being considered an active farmer because the bottom line behind CAP is to produce good-quality food, to make sure that we have food security within Europe,” she added.

Doyle said it would be naive to finalise the definition of an active farmer too early.

“I think I have a definition of an active farmer as somebody who is producing food, good-quality food and trying to make a living out of it; now that may be part-time farming, because some have to work off-farm in order to make it a living,” she explained.

“Part-time farmers are putting a lot of work and money into their farms because they're using their off-farm income to develop their farms, so we have to give credit there, as we have to give credit to those who are specialising, who are farming full-time and really struggling to make a living, and hopefully that CAP will support them too.”

Food security

She also highlighted her fears over food security.

“I do believe that Europe is selling out its food security. We sold out our military security, we sold out our industrial security and I think we're rapidly selling out our food security as well,” she claimed.

“If you don't support the agricultural sector, not just in Ireland, but right across Europe, people are exiting from it and not coming into it, and it's a sad day because farming is a wonderful lifestyle, a vocation.”