Commissioner Hogan answered questions from Macra members at the conference in the Riverside Hotel, Macroom, on Saturday 24 October.

Sean Coughlan, Adergoole Macra, Co Mayo

Q:For me the huge issue is that the CAP has turned from supporting food production into a reward for land ownership. There’s an awful lot of land out there lying idle and owners are getting a reward for sitting on it. Some people would regard it as an ageist thing when I talk about over 65 but there are as many guilty people that are under 65. Is there anything that can be done in the next CAP review for rural Ireland and rural Europe to increase economic activity in rural areas and give people who want to work a chance to do so?

Hogan: This comes down to the definition of an “active farmer”. The European Commission produced a definition of “active farmer” in 2012 during the last reform. The Council of Ministers and the Parliament decided that they could not agree on a definition so they came up with a negative list to define what is not an active farmer.

I am disposed towards reviewing that because, in my view, that is the problem. But it will require a change in the basic act and that will not happen until 2017-18 at the earliest.

Martin O’ Regan, Kinsale Macra, Co Cork

Q:I am a tillage farmer and greening is absolutely killing any sort of efficiency we are trying to get into the system. We are share-farming 50 acres less than a mile away from our home farm. In that 50 acres we have to split in into winter barley and winter oats. Within 50 acres we have to plant two different crops, which I will have to come back to two or three times to spray; it will have to be spread with fertiliser on two different occasions. It is grand theoretically, but in terms of efficiency it is terrible.

Hogan:We will be reviewing all of the frustrations you have expressed in 2016 under the Ecological Focus Areas (EFAs) and greening. In my view there has been a lot of work done for years under cross-compliance and then we tried to add in another set of bureaucratic measures for farmers. In my view this has set back some of the environmental objectives we set out to achieve.

It has created a lot of unnecessary frustration. Farmers want to be good in terms of the environment and soil fertility and watercourses. Because if farmers don’t have good soil fertility they are not going to be able to grow progressively good-quality, high-yielding crops.

We have not got the right set of tools in place at the moment. Let’s look at that in a serious way and do a proper analysis based on practice of farms. We will have to have environmental obligations but this is the approach we need to take. The simplification agenda and the review of EFAs will be done in 2016.

Fintan McSweeney, Donoughmore Macra, Co Cork

Q:Quotas went this year, milk price is at 25.5c/l and we are putting product into intervention. These are all short-term measures, but will we see a long term gain? Intervention is only short-term – we’d like to see some plan in place that will protect us from volatility.

Hogan:I am looking at the financial instruments where we can help that in terms of people who want to invest in restructuring the dairy industry in the post-milk quota era. It comes back to the money, the term you get it at and the price you get it at.

The other aspect is markets. And I need to go find new markets for products. I have put 200,000t of SMP in storage but that is not going to last forever. You want to see certainty in the medium to long term and not see a crisis every year.

If we could get an average price of 33-35c/l, it would make farmers happy and that needs to be sustained in the long term. We have a market-orientated policy – my job is to try and help. I am a pro-trade Commissioner; that has not always been the case. I am going to travel as far as I can next year to try to get new markets for your product. In the meantime, we will create a safety net in case of a crisis.

However, the financial part is the critical bit. We need to get competition into the banking sector and to design products that will help young farmers and also those who are progressive and want to expand. We do not want them to get into trouble as happened when I was growing up in the 1970s when people invested a lot of money and then the ACC came back looking for it with 20% interest. We have to avoid that. We do not want to be putting farmers’ backs to the wall with irresponsible lending.

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