Irish dairy farmers will have to pay a superlevy of €9.6 million for over-producing milk last year, the European Commission announced at the weekend.
The announcement came as a farm leader, Mr Dominic Cronin, chairman of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association's dairy committee, warned that farmers are over-producing milk again this year.
According to the Boherbue-based farmer, the good grass growth recorded this year will mean that many farmers' quotas are now almost full five months before the end of the production year.
The milk production year runs from the end of March to April 1st.
Irish farmers are allowed produce just over 1.1 billion gallons of milk annually under the complicated milk quota system which was introduced by the commission in the 1980s in an effort to balance the market and protect it from over-supply.
The superlevy fine for over-production is first imposed on the State, but then is passed on to the producers through their creameries, and individual farmers will know in a couple of weeks how large a penalty they face.
The commission statement said that in the period 2003/04, the total quota for deliveries to dairies was set at 117.78 million tonnes, just over 25 billion gallons of milk, which was divided into 529,000 individual quotas, for the whole of the European Union.
According to their declarations, nine member-states, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Austria, exceeded their quotas, and together account for an overrun which meant they faced a levy totalling €384 million.
"In the delivery-to-dairy sector over five marketing years (1999/2000 to 2003/04), the total quota in EU-15 has gone up from 116 to 117.8 million tonnes as a result of special quota increases authorised in connection with the Agenda 2000 reforms," it said
The report added that at the same time the number of producers has gone down from 703,000 to 529,000, and the average quota of each producer has increased by almost 13 per cent.
Ireland is the only EU country to continue to measure quota in gallons rather than tonnes.