Agriculture and food production are under scrutiny as never before. As EU living standards rise, the price of food is no longer the determining factor where many consumers are concerned. They want to know how it is produced in terms of animal welfare, and they are increasingly willing to pay for a guarantee of food safety. Outbreaks of BSE and Foot and Mouth diseases in recent years have exacerbated consumer concerns in that regard, along with a rash of scandals touching on the quality of food production.
The EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, Mr David Byrne, along with the Commissioner for Agriculture, Rural Development and Fisheries, Mr Franz Fischler, spoke in Dublin yesterday about the need for Irish farmers and related industries to produce high quality, competitive, safe food. And they outlined changes that are likely to occur following a mid-term review of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
Central to those developments, will be the establishment of a European Food Safety Authority that will serve as an independent trans-national control body along with the introduction of stricter rules on animal feed, production and trade. These new checks and controls, such as animal tagging and traceability, will cost money. But the behaviour of a minority of crooked farmers in smuggling animals, feeding growth promoters and other illegal substances, makes it necessary. The need to monitor and regulate factory-farming methods, which have been the source of disease outbreaks in Britain and on the Continent, is also widely accepted at Commission level because of the costs involved and the threat to human health.
Reform of the CAP should benefit Irish agriculture. Initially, the CAP was all about increasing productivity, but recent experience has changed that focus. Food safety and quality have now been ranked on the same scale as productivity and price. Preserving a farming population through a fair standard of living is a given, while the management of natural resources, maintenance of the countryside and rural development has become part of CAP policy.
The objective is to continue to shift financial resources from market supports to rural development aid in order to reward farmers for the multi-functional services they provide to the community. In addition, special incentives will be provided for the production of organic and quality foodstuffs. At the heart of the revised policy is a determination to ensure food safety and adequate standards of animal welfare along with better controls for agricultural products.
Under the CAP, Irish agriculture was driven by crop subsidies and headage payments. It led to overstocking and the excessive use of pesticides and fertilisers as farmers sought to increase their incomes. In spite of that, the number of Irish people on the land continued to decline in recent decades, dropping by about 4,000 a year. That slow haemorrhage accelerated to 12,000 last year as choice of off-farm employment became more widely available.
Undertakings given by this Government on global warming and the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions will require a sizeable reduction in the national cattle herd. Overstocking of sheep has led to serious erosion and pollution problems along the West coast and will have to change. Sheep tagging and sustainable agricultural schemes will help to deal with those problems. It all means that smaller farmers will have to diversify and increased CAP resources will have to be allocated to agri-environment measures and to create employment opportunities for rural populations.