The non effect of a non measure
AS THE non-effects of the non-measure that was Budget 2019 ‘sink in’, it is time, surely, for us to draw certain conclusions about where farm families and the wider agri-food sector stands in the Government’s list of priorities and concerns. Our estimation of where we stand on that list is greatly aided by a cool and rational examination of what the Government did – or rather, did not do - in the Budget. On that basis, the basis of what they did as opposed to what they seemed to be saying, it is shockingly obvious that the current Government simply does not understand the scale of the challenges being faced by farm families, either in terms of the 50% fall in income predicted for this current year or the transformational challenges that could follow Brexit next March. There were no signs of any appreciation of the scale of the problems not just looming on some distant horizon but here now and already biting into our unique family farm system. In the absence of any kind of coherent response, farm families can only conclude that the Government has decided that it doesn’t want to support farm families and the agenda now seems to be about enhancing the position of corporate structures and big business over family farms.
I am genuinely reluctant to come to this position, but it is the only logical conclusion to arrive at based on the 9 October Budget. Introducing new minor schemes with more conditions and more inspections along with tweaks of existing schemes won’t solve the massive underlying problems and is simply ‘throwing shapes’ rather than providing real solutions for the farming community. A perfect example of what I mean is furnished by the litany of inaction in dealing with the ‘Gorilla In The Room’ that is farm income volatility.
The biggest single-issue facing family farms is income volatility that has them trapped in an utterly destructive ‘BoomBust’ cycle that can see their annual incomes go from relatively proportionate to absolute collapse in the space of a single year. 2018 is already on the way to providing a gruelling test of farm families’ abilities to take financial knockout blows and stay standing. Just to remind readers: Teagasc is already predicting that average farm incomes will fall by a full 50% this year and, as sole traders, the taxation system absolutely hammers farmers on the basis of their last year’s figures without the slightest concession to the current situation. ICMSA and others have consistently highlighted this fact and the Government has acknowledged the problem. As a matter of fact, Minister Creed acknowledged this following the last two Budgets and it is beyond disappointing that he has failed - yet again - to deliver for farm families on this matter. We have corporate structures in Ireland and ‘Big Business’ paying effective tax rates of 1% and yet our Government cannot bring in a simple measure to assist farm families to establish a volatility fund under the supervision of the Revenue Commissioners that could be utilised for difficult years. One would now have to question at this stage the level of priority that agriculture is getting around the Cabinet table and this should be a matter of concern for everyone in rural Ireland.
Not one single other group in Irish society is faced with the kind of income collapse that farmers are currently enduring. No other group is expected to go year-to-year, working the same technically-demanding and exhausting schedules, but always vulnerable to massive market and income volatility that is, more often than not, caused and instigated by margin manipulation by other more powerful links in the food supply-chain. I ask you to imagine any scenario where any other group in Ireland facing a 50% drop in income would have that financial disaster completely ignored and bypassed?
But that is precisely the situation in which farm families in Roscommon and all over Ireland find themselves.
The Government has a choice: either support the family farm structure or, in all honesty, tell these farm families concerned that it is going in a different direction and they must assume that the Government has no interest in the continuation of the farm family system – much less its prosperity. That at least would be the honest thing to do. In not introducing an income volatility measure along the lines we suggested in the Budget, the Government seems to have actually made that choice, but, out of courtesy if nothing else, they should announce it as Government policy.