An additional €23m for ANC areas, rolling over the 2018 low-cost loan pot, extension of existing tax reliefs for farmers and a new suckler scheme. All in all, the Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed was content with Budget 2019 when the Irish Farmers Journal sat down with him on Tuesday evening.

However, details remain sketchy for all of the above. The budget for Areas of Natural Constraints (ANC) in 2019 has been increased to €250m.

“In a strange way, because there are fewer farmers, getting back to €250m [as it was in 2008] gives the capacity for a higher average payment to farmers,” Minister Creed said.

No decision has been made to skew the additional €25m in favour of higher disadvantaged categories, but the minister said he would be inclined to do that.

Parallel to this is the re-designation of ANC areas under EU legislation. He is hopeful that the new maps will be released next month.

RDP

The Department has a €638m commitment under the Rural Development Programme (RDP) for 2019 and Creed maintains that the full allocation for the 2014 to 2020 period will be spent. “We will draw down every cent that is available from Europe.

In the most recent profile of our spending commitments in the RDP, in fact we are likely to overspend by in the region of €104m.”

Loans

This time last year, the Government announced that there would be a successor to the Agri Cashflow Low Cost Loan Scheme.

However, that scheme never materialised in 2018. Instead, it will be spent in 2019 to create a collaborative fund between the SBCI, European Investment Fund, State Agencies and the Department of Finance to create a fund of €300m. This has been packaged as the Future Growth Loan Scheme, which is available to SMEs and farmers.

When asked if a proportion could be ring-fenced for farmers, Creed said his “belief would be that coming in to it with the amount of funding we are committing that it would be leveraged to deliver a minimum amount of that fund to primary producers.”

He clarified at Wednesday’s press briefing that due to the involvement of the European Investment Fund, the auditor general’s advice is that legislation must be passed to “get the product up and running”.

The Minister for Business will bring a memo to Government on this shortly.

“I don’t expect that there will be any undue delay to the legislation. Whether it will be part of the finance bill or is standalone legislation is unclear,” Creed said.

Taxation

The minister was keen to point out that the value of tax initiatives (stock relief, stamp duty exemption and income averaging) to the agricultural sector is over €250m. But while the Government set aside a €2bn “rainy day fund” for itself, mirrored on what some of the farm organisations were calling for, it did not make this available to farmers.

Income averaging was extended to farmers with additional self-employed income who could not participate before.

“There are no shortages of things you can ask for. We have in this budget improved the suite of measures available to deal with volatility.”