I move:
That Seanad Éireann condemns the failure of the Minister for Agriculture, Food and Rural Development to address the crisis in the beef industry; to bring forward proposals to rid the national herd of remaining cases of BSE; and his utter failure to simplify the application documentation for the various premia and income support schemes which has given rise to the disproportionate and unjust penalty system.
There is a slight misprint on the Order Paper regarding the motion, but I do not know whose fault it is. The motion refers to proposals to rid the national herd of "remaining" cases of BSE, but should refer to proposals to rid the herd of "recurring" cases of BSE.
I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, Deputy Davern. I would have been delighted if the Minister, Deputy Walsh, had come into the House as most of my comments are directed at him. However, I do not wish to take from the work of the Minister of State. I have little criticism to make of the Minister of State as most of my criticism is directed at the Minister.
This debate is timely as agriculture remains one of the pillars of the economy and continues to face difficulties. We are on the eve of the mid-term review which arose from the Berlin summit in 1999. The last set of CAP reforms included a mid-term review to begin in 2002 which has to be completed by early 2003. Therefore, it is timely that this House makes an input into the position to be taken by Ireland regarding the crucial mid-term review. The general outlook is that the review will result in more cuts in, and pressures on, the CAP.
Irish farmers are among the lowest paid in Europe. The average farm income in Ireland is about €13,000 or €14,000. One of the three issues which I have identified for the purposes of this debate is the situation faced by beef farmers. On average beef farmers earn less than €7,000 per annum, an income which would keep one just above the poverty line.
I wish to deal first with the critical issue of beef. There is much talk on the part of the Department and the Minister regarding the reopening of markets for Irish beef. Our main market is the UK. Our current situation is similar to that of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, prior to our entering the EU, in that the vast majority of our beef has to be sold to the UK. All of our international markets are closed. There has been much talk of the reopening of the Egyptian market. Technically speaking that market has reopened, but not one ounce of Irish beef is being exported to Egypt which was one of our best markets.
Commissioner Fischler and the Minister promised that when the Egyptian market opened there would be a move to increase export refunds, but this has not happened. Why has there been no move to increase export refunds to third countries as promised by the Minister and the Commissioner? Such an increase would improve access to the Egyptian market where we face difficulties competing against cheaper beef from India and Brazil. There has never been a more opportune time to address the problem of export refunds. I would ask the Minister of State to address this issue first. It is a pity the Minister is not here because there is a beef management meeting in Brussels this week and I want to know whether this issue will be raised.
The Minister is fond of, and has confidence in, Bord Bia. According to the board, in the coming year we will need markets to take an additional 100,000 tonnes of Irish beef. This year we will not have the slaughter scheme which took a significant amount of beef off our market last year and we have no international markets, other than Russia. We had profitable markets in Indonesia, the Philippines, Algeria and South Africa which took 100,000 tonnes of beef from the Irish market. However, all of these markets are now closed, except Russia.
If Russia takes 30,000 tonnes, at best, this year, what will happen in August, September and October when there is a glut of cattle on the market? What provisions are being made for new markets in these countries which are closed to us? They are closed due to BSE to which I will come in a moment, but something must be done to ensure that the international marketplace in which we had several customers and where we have several potential customers is opened to us.
We do not want a repeat of what happened last August. In three weeks of that month when the Minister was on holidays and Brussels was closed, the price of beef over 30 months old went into free-fall, dropping by 15p or 16p per pound. Thousands of farmers were ruined by those events because there was a large number of cattle over 30 months old in the herd at that time. They were fetching reasonable prices throughout June and July, but in August when a glut suddenly appeared, they suffered the brunt of it. Nothing was done. The price fell, on average, by £100 to £120 per head. The Minister was away on holidays, Brussels was closed down and nobody cared. Everyone had their backs turned. That is not acceptable and it should be an election issue.
That kind of thing cannot be allowed to happen in the autumn of 2002. Prices are currently reasonable or even good because of the pick-up in trade in the UK as a result of the slaughter that took place during its foot and mouth crisis. This will not last when the cattle start to come off grass feeding in August, September and October and maybe a couple of weeks of November.
The critical issue of the beef market must be addressed in the coming six months or so. I would like the Minister to provide some answers in his reply this evening – not just a banal spiel written by his Department officials, but direct answers to our specific questions. The main problem in the beef industry is BSE, which is a very serious matter. Other than a policy of saying as little as possible, no policy exists.
I obtained some figures for BSE incidence today from the Department of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development and they are quite worrying. In January 2001, 19 cases of BSE were reported. For the next few months everything was all right but come August, 41 cases were noted. In September there were 33 cases, in October 26 and in November we had the highest figure ever at 53. In December, leaving Christmas aside as cases are only noted during slaughter, there were 22 cases. In January of this year there were 42 cases and at least ten cases have been reported in the first half of February.
Something must be done about this. We have never addressed the question. Enormous damage is being done. These figures will leap up and bite us later this year. The excuse that will be used by our customers, the Saudis, the Indonesians and the South Africans, is the huge number of BSE cases in the national herd.
Has any thought been given to a targeted cull of cattle in certain areas, for example where farmers were customers of the seven or eight feed compounders who were the biggest offenders in manufacturing the product which gave us BSE? We should be able to identify them. Female animals are the most numerous victims of BSE. I am not sure what percentage of animals in the dairy herd are over five years of age – perhaps Senator Kiely, who is a dairy farmer, could advise us on that. It may be as high as 50% or it may be less. A major problem is that a total cull over six or seven years of all the animals at risk, with full compensation, would be extremely costly, to say nothing of the huge disruption which would be inflicted upon the dairy industry and on milk production.
However, something must be done. We must introduce a targeted cull of animals of a certain age, or animals in certain herds which have been particularly at risk from infected feed. We know that the feed was manufactured by six or seven compounders and these are only the worst offenders. Not a hand has been lifted against any of those compounders, but there should have been. Later in the debate we will talk about the penalties placed on farmers who make simple errors in application forms and so on. No penalties have been imposed upon these people, no more than in respect of the wrongdoing uncovered by the beef tribunal. These people have done enormous damage to this critical sec tor of the industry which is still the largest in the country.
We must find a new approach to the problem. Perhaps radical solutions are called for, but statistics show that more than twice as many cases of BSE showed up in January 2002 as in the same month in 2001. The amendment to the motion states that we are putting in place a better set of detection controls and so on. However, this is not the point. Our international customers will be reading these statistics. We must end our policy of shushing and saying nothing, because it is simply not enough.
The level of frustration and anger boiling up among farmers about bureaucracy and penalties is quite something. We will all get it in the neck during the election campaign but the Government will deservedly get quite a roasting from the farming community. An opportunity has been missed. An agreement on integrated controls was reached in December between the European Commission and this country, but nothing was done during those talks to simplify the application system or to alleviate the draconian nature of the penalties. Farmers bring these upon themselves by the simplest human error of not ticking a certain box or answering a question. The questions are not simple. The application document is convoluted and deliberately complicated. The form of words used is different for each question. Phrases such as force majeure are used. An ordinary farmer may never in his education have been exposed to phrases such as this. I do not know what it means. A phrase such as “in circumstances beyond your control” could be used instead, but the Department puts in something like this to confuse people. It is totally unnecessary and is typical of the abstruse and inscrutable nature of the wording used. The Minister is smiling, but this is a serious problem. I can assure him the smile will be wiped from his face during the election campaign