It has been billed as the "big week" for farmers, but it is consumers who should be most concerned about the outcome of the EU farm council this week in Brussels.
That is the view of Mr John Mannion, chairman of the Irish Farmers' Association Galway branch, who led last week's protest in the city.
"It is fine to talk about free trade if the public is getting quality food, but consumers are still paying twice over, and the main beneficiaries are the multinational supermarket chains," he says. "We've had price cuts before, and the consumers have not gained. It is time that politicians confronted the multinational vested interests who control distribution." Mr Mannion takes issue with criticisms levied at his organisation by Mr Joe Molloy and other supporters of the United Farmers' Association, and emphasises that the IFA has 4,500 paid-up members in Galway county alone, and collects levies from some 12,000.
"It is very easy to express a viewpoint without putting in the work. Yes, we are trying to raise awareness among the general public about the impact of CAP reform on this economy, but we have also been under pressure to deal with the fodder crisis." The feisty talk of the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, before leaving for the council is appreciated by Mr Mannion, who realises he has a difficult task ahead. It is viewed in a different light by Prof Michael Cuddy, professor of economics at NUI Galway.
He believes the Republic is powerless to influence proposals, and Mr Walsh is playing politics to his constituency at home by suggesting otherwise.
Prof Cuddy, who was involved in a major study in the 1980s on the Common Agricultural Policy, is a long-time critic of the system. "In effect, CAP subsidises farm prices, but only half of the amount is going to the farmer and half is going to administration. The larger the output, the greater the subsidy, which makes for a very inefficient policy indeed," he says.
Various "attacks" on the CAP, most notably the MacSharry plan in the early 1990s, tried to focus on farmers at the lower end of the income scale, and the concept behind the Rural Environment Protection Scheme was to appoint smallholders as custodians of the landscape. "Ireland should have supported this approach, but the large farmers led by the IFA opposed it," Prof Cuddy says. "We opposed reductions in grain, for instance, even though we only had a handful of grain farmers, so our Government was not being logical in following the IFA line." "Now in the latest reform package, we have the budgetary problem on one hand and pressure from the World Trade Organisation, which is looking for a level playing field as regards prices. The third pressure is the fact that the economies of less-developed countries are suffering as a result of under-priced food imports from the EU. In addition, the food industry which has to compete against those low prices is also being discriminated against."
The main engine driving the reform package is money, and the fact that over 60 per cent of the EU's total budget is earmarked for CAP. There has never been a better time to attack CAP, he says, as most of the European governments are socialist.
"Eighty per cent of Irish farmers are already part-time, and this is the way it is going to be," Prof Cuddy says. He believes that Irish agriculture cannot continue to be a protected sector. Farmers' supports will be cut, and the IDA and Enterprise Ireland have a role to play in providing alternative means of income for those who wish to stay on the land. "Ultimately, if we want open markets for our industrial goods and commercial services, we have to play the game. For the Minister to suggest otherwise is misleading. The best he can do is slow down the process, but this is a train that has started rolling and he isn't going to stop it."
