I want to begin by saying what I have already said in public — the fact that agreement has been reached on the Common Agricultural Policy reform at least is to be welcomed. The Minister for Agriculture and Food says that Irish farmers will benefit to the tune of some £70 million while spokespersons for farming associations say precisely the opposite, and both cannot be right. Even though few of them agree on this subject, objective commentators and journalists tend to favour the Minister's assertion rather than the assertion of the leaders of the farming organisations. Nevertheless, the entire set of proposals will need to be carefully studied and objectively appraised by all of us before it is possible to analyse the many risks and challenges which will face Irish agriculture in the years ahead as a result of the changes which will take place in the industry. It will be several months before it is possible to assess the immediate cash effects of these changes on farmers. It may even take years for some of these eventual consequences to filter through, for example, the cheque in the post or the promised payment from the Department. In the end factors which have nothing to do with Common Agricultural Policy reform but which affect farmers' incomes will make it difficult to arrive at any true figure of the benefits for farmers.
By the same token, no one should take it for granted that the benefit for consumers will not be swallowed up. This, too, will require a detailed response from the Government. It was stated last week that there would be a £100 million bonanza for Irish consumers from the Common Agricultural Policy reform. Such talk should be treated with a large grain of salt, unless specific action is taken by the Government to make it happen. A sum of £100 million will mean roughly £25 for every member of the population. If this bonanza is spread over three years, it will mean £8 per consumer per annum in their food bill. This will not alleviate the plight of a great many families to any great extent, particularly families on social welfare who need food as a sustenance.
The real danger I see is that this bonanza will not trickle down to consumers but rather will be a bonanza for processors and middle men. Deputies on all sides of the House have a responsibility to ensure that this bonanza gets to the people who need it. If the reduction in product prices is to be passed on to where it will do the most good, it will require specific Government initiatives. During the seventies the National Prices Commission acted as a watchdog for consumers to ensure that price increases were fully justified. The time has surely come for the Government to consider the creation of a similar watchdog to ensure that consumers benefit to the maximum possible extent from price reductions and that these are not creamed off in fatter profits for already wealthy individuals.
I know several Government Ministers have already spoken about taking action to ensure that consumers benefit. With respect, I would suggest that talk is not enough. There is a readily available model in the National Prices Commission, which at several junctures in its history was of very considerable benefit to the ecomony and to consumers generally, to ensure that consumers benefit.
Consumers in this context means families, including farm families and families on social welfare. Every family in Ireland spends a high proportion of their disposable income on food — the poorer the family, the higher the proportion required. It is time farm families were given an assurance that there is now some hope of a reduction in food prices. The Government should act to ensure that that reduction is as large as possible and act immediately to put the structures to control this in place in time.
It is also clear that there is a fundamental moral issue that has yet to be addressed by the European Community. For years, we have been paying people to produce food for deep freezing, including storage compartments on ships. Now we are going to pay people to produce a lot less food. This agreement has been reached during a month when hundreds of thousands of people may die from hunger in the Third World. Surely it is time for a Community that wants to plan for the future to begin to take hunger into account? I fully recognise that there is a danger of simplistic approaches or solutions to this issue. I do not have all the answers by any means, but I am convinced that not enough thought has been given to this issue either at home or abroad.
Ireland has probably the worst record of any of the member states in the area of Third World aid. We will undoubtedly slip further down that league when the Scandinavian countries, with their outstanding record in this area, become full members of the Community. The point must be made that this scandalous and shameful record is not the record of the Irish people. No people in the world have a prouder tradition of being willing to help and support the Third World than we have. However that record has been besmirched by the attitude of this Government and their predecessors: they have made the most savage and heartless cuts in a vulnerable budgetary subhead. This has happened in a country which produces surplus food while much of the world is starving. Clearly, if reform of the Common Agricultural Policy is to mean anything in the long run it must begin to be seen as a mechanism, among other things, for addressing the issue of world hunger.
To return to the central point of this debate, it is already clear that a great deal of the future of Irish agriculture lies in our hands and in the heads of the industry. Planning for the future, to take full and proper account of the changes now underway, must start now. For example, the Culliton report has already called for the publication of a national food plan. This must be seen as the first priority of the Government who have accepted the recommendations of the Culliton report in principle.
For years, we have been calling for a proper plan, to include all the relevant interests, for the development of the food industry. Processing, efficiency of production, pricing of the product, quality, diversification, "green" agriculture, down stream industry and rural development are the essential ingredients of any plan for the future. We will continue to get help from the European Community in developing a more rounded approach to our main industry if we are serious ourselves. In other words, there is never the time when we should be congratulating one another, slapping each other on the back, or wasting time in abusing each other over the outcome of any negotiations. The future for Irish agriculture starts now. If all the essential interests are prepared to work together, there is no reason the future should be bleak.
It should not be forgotten that the Common Agricultural Policy, which is almost as old as the Community itself and the only policy of any signifance in the Community, is underpinned by a number of basic principles which were enshrined in the Treaty of Rome. These include such aims as sustaining family farms; ensuring a reasonable income for family farms through a guaranteed minimum price structure for produce; and ensuring an adequate supply of food for consumers at a reasonable cost. Many of these aims are incompatible but they are all aspirations of the Common Agricultural Policy.
In reforming the Common Agricultural Policy, what has been reformed essentially is the mechanisms through which these aims are intended to be realised. In examining this reform we ought not to lose sight of what happened to some of these aspirations under the old mechanisms of the Common Agricultural Policy, mechanisms which some people wanted to remain in place but which all of us realised could not remain in place. For example, over the past 20 years we have lost thousands of people who were previously engaged in agriculture in rural Ireland. The Common Agricultural Policy in its previous form made millionaires out of intervention companies, freezer suppliers and storage and shipping operators, but it made very few millionaires out of people engaged in agriculture.
The Irish food industry became almost totally dependent on intervention for beef and milk products. Not only did those cost the European taxpayer billions, but the higher prices thus secured were borne by Irish consumers among others. Finally, under the existing Common Agricultural Policy the incentive to diversify, or to upgrade quality and marketing, was never as great as the incentive to concentrate more and more product in ways that would attract intervention support.
The new mechanisms will aim to support the producer and not the product. In itself, it is a flawed system, just as the old one was. Under the old system, farmers were paid to produce goods which had to be kept in deep freezes for years because there was no market for them. Under the new system, farmers will be paid not to proudce at all or, in the event, to produce a lot less. We are telling 300,000 unemployed people we will pay them because they have no work, while we are telling farmers we will pay them because we do not want them to work. What economic system could tolerate a continuation of that philosophy?
Many questions remain. Supporting the producer rather than the product could lead to 100 per cent of the cost of subsidisation. Is this realistic, or is it a false promise? Who will bear the cost? Is the European Commission prepared to guarantee compensation to farmers on a permanent basis for producing less and less, and will that compensation be geared to keep pace with the cost of living; will it be index-linked, so that incomes on land stay abreast of incomes generally?
I doubt very much if the answer to all of these questions is an unequivocal yes. In reality, I believe that this Common Agricultural Policy reform package must be seen as a way of buying time for Irish agriculture. Everyone involved in the industry has known for years — even if they were not prepared to say it publicly — that the intervention system was insupportable in the long term. By the same token, everyone in the industry has known that abuses of the system were widespread and that sooner or later someone would have to cry halt.
In a sense, therefore, these reform proposals, whether we like them or not, are an opportunity to look afresh at Irish agriculture; to look at its methods of production; to look at its efficiency; to look at the range and the quality of products and to look at the marketing and selling and true export potential of the industry.
Anyone following the reports of the Beef Tribunal over the last month or so will have noticed innumerable references to the national interest as the basis for all decision-making in relation to Irish agriculture. The bottom line is this. An agricultural industry that produces no added value would be contributing very little to the national interest over the long term, because it simply could not survive as an industry.
Our job now is to stop talking about Common Agricultural Policy and Common Agricultural Policy reform as if they were the only buzzwords and start turning added value into the buzzwords of the nineties for our biggest industry. One of the other things that is clear from the Beef Tribunal is the enormous sums of money we have spent over the years — both at the level of the State and the level of the private entrepreneur — in finding markets for raw meat all around the world. That was based on a policy of developing value added. If we are serious about value added, is it not time we stopped spending so much money on freezing and shipping great lumps of raw meat to Africa and the Middle East where at times they will not pay for it, unless we want to divert it to the Third World where need for it has already been identified. It is time we started figuring out how to get what is virtually an organically-grown product into the environmentally conscious markets of Germany and the United Kingdom. It is not time we began to develop away from a beef industry and towards a proper food industry? Value added means planning. There are many other things we need to do in the time available to us, such as the introduction of new products, market research and development, the development of agri-tourism and a total concentration on ways of import substitution.
In short, I firmly believe that instead of recriminating about Common Agricultural Policy reform, or blandly assuming that our worries are over, we should see this development as a window of opportunity which will remain open for a very short time. We should be prepared to grasp that opportunity with both hands. It is, as I have said, an opportunity to examine our major industry in a whole new light and to bring together all of the interests which are important to the industry. We should begin to plan a new future because the national interest is at stake.
