Parachute payments ‘least worst’ option for industry

The parachute payments to be made to farmers in the country’s remote and fragile areas in place of the 2018 Less Favoured Area Support Scheme is the “least worst” option for the industry, it has been claimed.

Accepting that these payments would represent a 20 per cent reduction on previous levels, NFU Scotland vice president, Martin Kennedy, said that pulling the ripcord on this option offered a softer landing than that which would be suffered under a move to the EU’S Area of Natural Constraint (ANC) scheme.

Stating that scrutiny of the ANC system had shown that under every scenario investigated, the “flatteningout”ofpaymentswould have favoured inactivity – and that active farmers and crofters across Scotland would have been the hardest hit by such a move.

Writing in the union’s website blog, Kennedy said that this was an outcome which the union simply could not defend, so the parachute payment had been viewed as the lesser of two evils.

Giving some background to the need for change, he said that LFASS had been well suited to Scotland and that the country had done

0 NFUS vice president Martin Kennedy a good job of complying with the rules and spirit of the scheme and had managed to implement it in a way which favoured active producers.

He said that while Scotland had been dead set against any move away from LFASS, there had, however, been a deal of abuse of the system by some EU member states – and he highlighted the fact that Luxembourg had claimed that 100 per cent of its land qualified as less favoured:

“We went to Brussels more than two years ago to make our case, sadly to no avail and whilst it was recognised that we were not abusing the system, we were told flatly that if we wanted funding then we had to change,” said Kennedy who had been involved in the negotiations for a number of years as chair of the union’s LFA committee.

He said that the ANC option not only risked considerably diluting the payments to farmers and crofters but, as it was set at parish level rather than individual farm level, many producers who were justifiably claiming under the old scheme would have been excluded under the rules of the new one.

While the union had drawncriticismfromsome quarters for supporting the parachute payments Kennedy said the organisation had seen the course as the “right path for the greatest majority”.