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Placing farmers' incomes at the centre of the Agri-Food 2030 strategy would change the entire worldview it employs.
Accepting that farmers should be fairly paid for the food they produce is only the start. It's worthless without also recognising that the 'trickle-down' theory, where farmers should be eventual beneficiaries of improved prices at retail level, has failed.
The link between the consumer and the producer has been broken. Sure, consumer confidence in Irish food is increased when a farmer's face is on the bottle of milk, bag of spuds, or fillet of steak.
I'm not arguing against the work Bord Bia do, or against Quality Assurance schemes. I'm arguing that they hold or enhance our market position. They don't increase the price we get in any transformative way.
And we need a transformation in farmgate prices to lift farm incomes. But at 55, with almost 40 years farming under my belt, I no longer believe that price transformation is coming to us through the foodchain. Ever.
Farm-gate prices
Improved farm-gate prices would no longer be a by-product of some grand unified theory of the foodchain. It would become the central focus of the agri-food strategy.
And what of the environment, I hear you say. What about the Green Deal, and Farm to Fork, and Agclimatise?
Well, increasing product prices would relieve the need for CAP to support commodity prices, freeing funds up for environmental schemes. That is obvious.
More crucially, building a system where the typical family farm earns a decent income takes the pressure off the neded to for greater scale, more intensity, or cutting costs, which can lead to cutting corners. That ties in with the aim to increase biodiversity and to increase the proportion of land farmed organically.
So this is something that the Environmental Pillar could get behind too.
And it isn't just environmental pressures that would be lifted. The work pressures farmers are under are directly linked to the appalling level of fatalities and serious accidents on Irish farms. A little bit more income for a little bit less output might be enough to start to change that dynamic too.
Ok, Pat, you might say, how do we do it. I'll freely admit I don't have the answer.
A little bit more income for a little bit less output might be enough to start to change that dynamic too.
That's not the point. I'm not expecting anyone to have the answer. I'm merely requesting that they start to ask the question. That's the first necessary step. And now is the time.
While I don't have the answer, I do have a suggestion. If it's agreed that what is required is a direct cash injection to the primary producer; if it is established that money should come from the consumer price, how do we force it on the food chain?
We don't. The food chain is unfixable. We bypass it, and build a motorway from the consumer to the primary producer. A food tax. Paid on all food, and paid to farmers. It wouldn't have to be that much. If farmers only receive about 30% of the consumer price, then a 5% food tax would convert to a near 20% price top-up for farmers.
Adding that extra cost would be regarded as a tax on the poor, but the reality is that food prices in real terms have been in freefall over the last 30 years. This is merely a correction.
People wouldn't have to pay more for their weekly shop either. The extra cost could be offset by more judicious shopping, which would reduce food waste - up to 20% of the food bought by EU consumers is dumped rather than eaten. This is not due to gluttony, it's because food is so cheap and disposable that people shop thoughtlessly. We all do it. I do it too.
Food tax
A food tax is at least as justifiable as the carbon tax on fuel.
Would it work? Who knows, I'm not an economist, I'm just a farmer.
But what we are doing is not working. And what we are planning to do over the next 10 years won't work either. Not in terms of transforming the incomes of food producers and bringing them up to a fair level. I know it, you know it, and Tom Arnold knows it.
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