THE Minister for Agriculture has warned farmers that they must cut beef production and promised to restructure the European Union beef sector by the end of the Irish Presidency of the EU.
Mr Yates was addressing a meeting of several hundred farmers in Dublin, called by the Irish Farmers' Association to launch "an angry autumn campaign" to demand Government action to halt the fall in cattle prices.
Public representatives from all parties and all rural constituencies were also present.
Mr Yates rejected farmers' accusations that the Government could have done more to deal with the crisis in beef prices.
The president of the IFA, Mr John Donnelly, said that the big turnout showed the farmers anger at the lack of a co-ordinated Government response.
Cattle prices had dropped by another 10p per lb in the past few months, a drop of £80 per head. Since this time last year prices had dropped by 22p a lb, an average of £184 a head, and a total loss of £235 million to the livestock sector.
He had not heard a word from any Minister about how serious the situation was. There had been no Cabinet meeting and no emergency Dail debate.
He called for guaranteed intervention which would return a realistic price to the producer and "take out volume" of beef production, and for the removal of weight limit restrictions for the autumn. He also called for an increase in the CAP budget 19 allow for "adequate" compensation.
Third-country markets had to be reopened, he said. In order to restore consumer confidence the Government would have to put structures and a campaign in place, and if it did so the farmers would do their part in ensuring the traceability of all beef.
Beef was 16 times as important to the Irish economy as it was in Britain, where the crisis had originated.
Mr Yates said there was no argument about the severity of the crisis. "It is the single largest catastrophe to hit any commodity in the 30-year history of the CAP," he said.
But he rejected the suggestion that the Government could have averted it. "Its origins were beyond our shores and the solution is beyond our shores," he said.
Even before the BSE crisis more beef was produced in the EU than was consumed, he said. The 1992 GATT agreement meant that the EU had to cut back by £100 million a year on subsidies to exports to third countries.
"500,000 animals have to be disposed of in as orderly a way as possible. The market can't cope with that. I will give farmers the truth, not what they want to hear. The EU has to make an orderly disposal of one million tonnes of beef that there is no market for. Intervention is only a short-term solution."
He said he had submitted a detailed technical proposal for intervention support to the EU Agriculture Commissioner, Mr Franz Fischler, in July.
He was looking for a floor price for beef and to raise the weight limits. He would be meeting him next week and hoped to have a "major breakthrough".
At future meetings he would be making a special attempt to get a further round of compensation for farmers by Christmas.
The Minister said he believed that, given the BSE crisis and the loss of consumer confidence in beef, the price drop was unavoidable, but he believed that prices would now stabilise.
But intervention could not be a long term solution, given the situation with GATT. "We must reform the beef sector, we must cut production, we can't ignore the reality," he said. "It is imperative for your livelihoods that you control production now while the safety net of intervention is there."
"There are no easy answers. But the answers there are will be found."
Later Mr Yates told journalists that this was "the most turbulent and difficult period in the history of the CAP", but said he hoped to have restructured the whole European beef sector by the end of the Irish presidency.
The Fianna Fail spokesman on agriculture, Mr Brian Cowen, who was also asked to address the meeting, appeared to acknowledge the Minister's efforts, saying "the Government and the Taoiseach need to take a more hands-on approach".
The EU intervention system was "cumbersome and bureaucratic", he said, and he called for its simplification.