Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 15 July 2021
8. Deputy Violet-Anne Wynne asked the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the measures he plans to include in the CSP in order to redistribute funding to smaller and poorer family farms; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [38543/21]
View answerMy question is on the measures the Minister plans to include in the CSP to redistribute funding to smaller and poorer family farms.
I thank the Deputy for her question. The aim of the CAP is to all support farmers across the community to continue to produce top quality and sustainable food. The redistributive mechanisms currently in place under pillar I of the CAP seek to create a more even payment landscape and target funds where they are needed most. These redistributive mechanisms comprise a core EU policy and are set to continue into the new CAP from 2023. The development of Ireland's CSP involves several stages, including a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, SWOT, analysis, in addition to a needs assessment, intervention design, financial allocations, target setting and governance systems. The draft CSP will be subject to an ex ante evaluation, strategic environmental assessment and appropriate assessment, including public consultation on the draft CSP and draft environmental report.
I continue to engage extensively with stakeholders on the future of CAP. Consultations on the development of the CSP will continue via the CAP consultative committee, which comprises representatives of the main stakeholders including farm bodies, NGOs, industry representatives and academia. This committee has met on 18 occasions and further meetings are planned.
The Presidency compromise package includes a suite of measures which will enable us to ensure the fair implementation of redistribution measures such as capping, convergence and complementary redistribution of income support for sustainability, CRISS, as it is known. The agreement strikes the right balance between ensuring a fair distribution of payments between farmers and achieving a higher level of environmental and climate ambition. It also provides member states with the flexibility required to implement the CAP in a way that best suits their national circumstances. This flexibility was one of my key objectives from the outset.
While agreement has been reached, further work remains on certain technical details of the proposed reforms. I expect to shortly bring a memo to Government and launch a public consultation on the draft interventions proposed for the CAP Strategic Plan. I will also continue to engage with stakeholders as we develop our CAP strategic plan 2023-2027.
Gabhaim buíochas for the information that the Minister has provided there. I refer to the flexibilities the Minister has held out for. These have left uncertainty as to what the final result will be, and most pressingly, whether it will abide by the status quo of favour to the bigger farmers or whether it will genuinely reallocate resources and do more to protect the small and medium-sized farmers. The 10% ring fence as a frontloaded payment, specifically with smaller farmers in mind, is one measure I know that has been mooted as a protection measure and I am aware that the Minister has referred to a few others there.
One would hope that there would be suite of measures being employed. The Clare farmers, in particular, have mentioned to me that access to and being able to avail of the eco schemes is of great importance to them and they are looking for clarity around that and a commitment that that will not impact on their single farm payment.
I thank Deputy Wynne for her comments. I will certainly be engaging now very comprehensively with farmers right across the country on the flexibilities that I delivered and it is important that we have those flexibilities at national level so that farmers can participate in framing our national plan that works for our country and that they have a role in that. This is very important to their incomes for the coming years and it is important that we had national capacity to frame that as opposed to it being decided at European level.
One of the key things I achieved and on which I very much set the agenda both at national level here and at European level was ensuring the capacity to significantly reduce the maximum payment under CAP from €150,000 in the current CAP to bring it down as low as €66,000 in the next CAP. That is something on which I will also be engaging with stakeholders over the coming period.
It is important that we ensure that CAP works well for farmers particularly on the eco schemes and while these deliver additional benefits it must ultimately be money that ends up in farmers' pockets. That will certainly be a key objective of mine on framing the final plan and in working with everyone it has affected.
It is very important to implement a definitive set of upper limit payments to avoid what happened last year, for example. We know that obscene payments were received by some individuals during the last CAP cycle, which some have called criminal. While the average smallholding and farmer struggled to make their vocation viable, reform is well overdue. The fact that the Minister has avoided responding to the call for the CAP strategic review to come before the Dáil does not exactly inspire confidence. Sinn Féin has and will continue to call for 100% convergence. If it was in place for the upcoming CAP cycle, for example, there would be an additional sum of more than €3 million streamed into the county of Clare. Can the Minister now commit not to deviate from the 10% front-loaded payment and to resume convergence in 2022 on the understanding that it is an incremental process and that we will need several years to reach that target? The fact that last year just 20 farms and 20 enterprises received €3.6 million when we know wealthy businessmen received €414,000 of European money is astonishing.
I thank the Deputy and call Deputy McNamara who wanted to come in on this question.
I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle. Some of the Minister's responses to my constituency colleague have been a bit short on detail but that, in fairness, may well be because the detail is just being worked out. I also appreciate that the negotiations have only been concluded very recently.
One of the things that the negotiations will allow is more co-funding being put into Pillar 2 and that is one of the most essential measures that the Minister and the Government can undertake to support small farmers, the farmers I and my constituency colleague represent in Clare, most of whom practise a very environmentally sustainable type of farming. They need, however, to be rewarded and protected in doing that. Is the Minister able to give a commitment that his Government will give the maximum co-funding possible, which is a greater percentage of a greater sum of money, for Irish farmers going forward?
I thank both Deputies Wynne and McNamara. First, to address Deputy Wynne, as I said to Deputy Carthy earlier on, I find it ironic listening to Sinn Féin being so insistent on Dáil involvement on the CAP strategic plan when it was its party's position that all of this should have been agreed at European level, that we would not have a role and that our hands would be tied on that. I fought hard to ensure that we would have the flexibilities to be able to frame our own national plan and to have farmer, stakeholder, and indeed Oireachtas involvement in shaping that and making those decisions.
On the issue of lowering the payment, that is something that I laid out at European level to ensure that we could bring it in. My objective was to bring it to €60,000 and €66,000 was the level achieved. I welcome the Sinn Féin support now for the position I had previously laid out on this.
On Deputy McNamara's point, he is completely correct. The co-funding on this is going to be very important and is something that I am engaging with my Government colleagues on and I will be doing everything I absolutely can to maximise this position. We also have the programme for Government commitment on the carbon tax which will be in addition to that.
