It was a pity that the public debate on the recent report predicting what rural Ireland might look like in 2025 was strangled before it even began in a silly row over figures. The world of agricultural analysis is a virtually impenetrable swamp of statistics, writes Mary Raftery.
Lethal sinkholes exist at every turn to trap the unwary in a morass of subsidies, subventions, interventions and allowances.
Everything appears convoluted and qualified. Finding a safe path through the hostile terrain and reaching some form of useful truth at the other side is a daunting task, but one which the authors of Rural Ireland 2025 - Foresight Perspectives intrepidly set themselves.
However, Minister for Agriculture Mary Coughlan immediately shot them down. She categorically rejected one of their conclusions, which had captured the headlines. The report had predicted that there were unlikely to be more than 10,000 full-time, commercially viable farmers left by 2025. Mary Coughlan, while generally welcoming the report at its launch last week, dismissed this out of hand.
She was reported as saying that she believed a previous forecast of 40,000 full-time farmers by 2015 was more accurate. Given the fact that there are currently only 20,000 of these in the country, and that nowhere can I find any forecast for a doubling of the figure, this remarkable prediction seems to exist only in the realms of the Minister's wishful fantasy.
She was reported elsewhere as stating that 105,000 commercial farms would remain in 2015 and the industry should "stop getting all hung up" on whether these would represent full-time farms or part-time farms.
This is an equally bizarre statement. The most reputable data in this area, compiled last year for the Agri-Vision 2015 report, puts the current number of commercially viable farms at a mere 38,700 (both full-time and part-time farms are included in this figure). That the Minister appears to believe that the number of commercially viable farms is set to almost treble within the next ten years puts her way out there, somewhere beyond the fairies.
The conclusion of the 2025 report that only 10,000 full-time farmers will remain by that date is in fact probably on the conservative side. It is based on the Agri-Vision 2015 calculations, and does not significantly differ from that earlier prediction. So, either the Minister made a simple error (for which anyone could be forgiven in the swamp of statistics) or else her spin on the 2025 report and figures is part of a pattern of making the farming sector out to be far more important to the Irish economy than it actually is. With the sector currently contributing 2.9per cent of GDP, this is predicted to decline by almost half, to 1.5 per cent, within the next decade.
The general consensus among the experts is that full-time farming will indeed drop significantly, by at least 50 per cent, and be replaced by part-time operations, with either farmers or their spouses (or both) having a job outside the farm. The 2025 report then posits an important question about the future viability of such off-farm employment in a world where multinationals may seek to relocate to other cheaper economies.
It is refreshing to see an analysis of rural Ireland placed within a context which is considerably wider than a simple concentration on agriculture and farmers.
For instance, it places the environment at the centre of future rural development. It further argues for the importance of attaching a specific economic value to it: "the daunting challenge involved, in striking the optimum balance between economic developments and environmental management, points to a concept of envisaging the environment as a virtual economic entity." Inherent in this, the report argues, is the concept of "public goods".
It proposes the urgent creation of an incentive scheme to encourage land owners to conserve natural habitats and archaeological sites, the destruction of which is predicted to accelerate during the next decade.
It also warns that unresolved issues concerning indiscriminate development and conflict over access to the countryside will become substantial impediments to economic growth. The depressing regularity of the rows between hillwalkers and farmers, which rage all summer, vanish during the colder months, only to return with increased rancour each year, remains just one example of rural Ireland cutting off its nose to spite its face.
The 2025 report emphasises the crucial importance of investing substantially in research and training to create what it calls a knowledge-based bio-economy, "built on the comparative advantage of Ireland's natural resources". In this regard, it is not encouraging to see that in the Estimates, the amount for research and training within the Department of Agriculture has remained relatively static.
Instead, we get foolish and distracting rows over numbers of farmers, which have served only to divert attention from the kind of decisions which the 2025 report argues we need to make in order to protect the vital resources of rural Ireland and the livelihoods of those who live there.