Regulation to blame for food prices – ICMSA

Food price inflation is inevitable, given the increasing regulation and associated costs being imposed on food production, ICMSA president Denis Drennan has said.

He said the cheap food policy that had operated for the last 30 years “on the backs of farmers has collapsed under the twin pressures of declining direct supports paid under CAP and astronomical costs associated with the State-ordained transition to low emissions and lower volume environmentally regulated farming”.

Reacting to growing consumer concern about retail food prices rising, Drennan insisted: “The kind of costs involved with complying with the whole raft of new sustainability and environmental regulations and requirements has ended the old ‘cheap food’ fantasy.

“It’s just not possible to pretend that farmers could carry everyone else through the astronomically expensive change in the way we farm and produce food.

“Farmers don’t have the money and, even if they did, why should they go on subsidising everyone else’s food costs?” he asked.

Drennan maintained that current food prices are the new normal and warned that proposed CAP changes would probably ensure a further round of rises in the cost to consumers of certain staples like beef and dairy.

“Just in the last month, the Commission signalled that it intends parachuting in another set of protocols around extending Ireland’s derogation from the nitrates directive. This is their introduction of the habitats directive,” he said.

“At the same time, they have made it clear that effectively the expansion of the EU’s defence budget is going to be part-financed out of massive reductions to CAP.

“Both of those proposals are going to inevitably lower milk volumes and lower direct supports, that, in turn, is going to mean that farmers must get more from the marketplace to just keep the same income; the market is going to have to make up what’s going to be cut in direct supports,” Drennan said.

“That’s going to mean higher prices and those higher prices are going to end up at the supermarket till,” he predicted.