Sir, - I am prompted to reply to the letters from John Donnelly, president of the IFA (August 5th) and Padraic Divilly, chairman IFA Farm Forestry Section (August 21st). I should like to make a number of points.
First, Mr Divilly argues that "the IFA agrees with the ESRI's basic view that forestry could play a positive role in helping to sustain rural communities". Nevertheless, the IFA continues to adopt a rather a la carte approach to the comprehensive reports on Irish forestry published by the ESRI in May 1993.
At present, about 500,000 hectares of land are under forest. The ESRI estimates that a further one million hectares of marginal agricultural land could be afforested without any significant reduction in total farm income, including existing subsidies paid under the CAP. It further calculates that the additional net income and the number of jobs generated from afforesting these lands would be in the region of £650m a year and 36,000 respectively.
In short, these million hectares of marginal land are surplus to agricultural requirements. To argue that Irish farmers are being cheated by forestry interests out of the opportunity "to expand their holdings in order to improve their longer term viability" misses the point. However unpalatable, the truth is that the size of holding on such land is immaterial. Forestry remains the more viable land use, and it is doubtful in the extreme if the EU will continue to subsidise an increasingly uneconomic agriculture in the medium, let alone the long, term.
Secondly, it is true that forestry currently enjoys an attractive grant and premium package, 75 per cent funded by the EU. However, it is disingenuous of Mr Donnelly to argue that forestry is only a viable option because of these supports. He should know, as well as anyone, that forestry was the more viable use for marginal land long before the generous grants of recent years came into being. For inescapably logical reasons, national and EU policy is to encourage this land out of food production, most of which is not needed and in any event can be produced more economically on better land, and into timber production for which demand within the EU far exceeds supply.
Thirdly, the IFA calls for the removal of the forest premium available to Coillte and the private sector, arguing that it gives this group a dominant position in the land market. In fact, because the rates of premia available to eligible farmers are very much higher, many farmers (themselves IFA members) will readily admit that they can and do pay more for land than the private sector.
Finally, may we once and for all dispel the myth that forestry causes rural depopulation, which has been a fact of life throughout the developed world for the greater part of this century. It will certainly continue in Ireland if no further afforestation takes place and in fact, as the ESRI has shown, forestry is likely to play a significant role in helping to stabilise the rural population.
Forestry offers a very real opportunity for the creation of wealth and long term prosperity in the poorer regions of this country. Might I suggest that Ms Donnelly, Divilly and their colleagues look to New Zealand and learn from that country's example just how much forestry, in a comparatively short space of time, has done for its rural population.
Yours, etc., for Cheveley Johnston &
Company.
27 Wellington Road,
Cork.