The biggest cuts in CAP payments will be those who are earning the most, Fine Gael MEP Seán Kelly said at the launch by Fine Gael’s agriculture committee of its report on the next CAP which was held on Thursday, 28 May, in the Firgrove Hotel in Mitchelstown.

“There are people drawing big funds who shouldn’t be drawing them,” he said, “there are people whose primary activity isn’t agriculture and people who have the basic minimum and who do no real activity other than throwing a few cattle or sheep or donkeys on a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand acres of land just to qualify.

“That’s not fair when the farmer who is actually producing the food which goes on the table is not getting the same crack of the whip.”

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Kelly said that the question of what is an active farmer will be one of the hardest things to define under the next CAP. He said that “livestock units per hectare will have to be part of it”. Under the current CAP, the required minimum stocking density is 0.1 livestock units per hectare, which is roughly equivalent to one ewe per hectare.

Off-farm income

He also said that talk about adjusting for off-farm income, basing payments on the percentage of income earned from farming “would not be fair”. On negotiations about generational renewal and payments to farmers in receipt of a pension, Kelly said there would have to be a “fair landing zone” to allow for farmers who wouldn’t have a large pension or large CAP payments.

Under the negotiation framework for the next CAP, the is a move to redistribute funds by reducing direct payments to larger farmers, known as ‘degressivity’. Kelly spoke in favour of the move, saying that research he had seen suggested that there would be no reduction for a farmer who was in receipt of €20,000 from CAP if the proposal went through as it is at the moment.

He said that it will be very important for member states to be allowed some flexibility in how payments are made. “A farm in the former USSR in Romania or Bulgaria is very different to a farm in Ireland”.

On the pace of negotiations, Kelly said that it is almost impossible for the Irish government to complete negotiations on the EU budget and the CAP by the end of this year, but if they can get the framework completed, that would be "hunky-dory".