Set of headaches for growers

the non-productive aspects of the system.

However, the Basic Payment scheme as currently structured is totally biased towards non-productive land assets and away from productive capacity of risk taking, entrepreneurship and elements that are necessary to allow for the development of a stable and sustainable agricultural sector into the future.

The Basic Payment system allows for far too much public money to end up in huge corporations, or with non-commercial hobby farms, or as retirement pension schemes.

All the while commercial, generally younger, producers are expected to take all the risk, prop the whole system up and try to make their income from the market as they pass back the entitlements to the land owners - the very thing that the CAP was established to counteract against.

As the EU Commission consider a mid-term review of the CAP, the easiest and most politically palatable approach would be to continue with the current system with some necessary amendments as they arise. However, the CAP as it is currently structured is a dinosaur that rewards efforts that were made in the last century, and actively mitigates against progression happening now.

The EU’s policy actions with regards to GM technology, to new pesticide development, to third country imports, to increasing productivity of our main sectors belies any policy statements and comforting words it makes.

In 1968, the then EEC commissioner for Agriculture, a Dutchman called Sicco Mansholt, published the Mansholt plan to encourage 5m European farmers to cease farming to allow the remaining farmers access to more land and a more viable future. As you can imagine, the plan went nowhere, because even then there was the ideology that food should be produced by the small family farm structure, regardless of the economics.

Since 1968, far more than 5m farmers have left the land and those that remain are far from certain of their viability, despite the hundreds of billions of public money spent on the industry. Perhaps it is time revisit past ideas to see if they could have some use in the modern context?

THE BIAS IN FAVOUR OF LANDOWNERS IS ENDEMIC IN THE WHOLE CAP SYSTEM

Richard Hackett is an agronomist based in north County Dublin and is a member of the ITCA and ACA