The decision by the European Parliaments Agricultural Committee to ratify the EU Commission’s draft Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) transition regulation has been welcomed by the Irish Natura and Hill Farmers Association (INHFA).
This regulation, implemented, offers a degree of stability to farmers in that the legal framework is extended to ensure payments can be made during the limbo period between CAP programmes, the organisation has said.
INHFA president Colm O’Donnell noted that the regulation “offers several options and flexibilities to member states”.
This includes the provision for continuing with the internal convergence model, the president said.
“This is the mechanism put in place by the commission to assist the process for a more equitable distribution of direct income support among farmers,” O’Donnell claimed.
During the pre-election debates, political parties made clear promises to farmers of their support for continuing with convergence during the transition period.
The president stressed that the transition period “offers a unique opportunity” to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine “to build new schemes that will foster more sustainable farming”.
“This is very easily done by rewarding existing good practices in extensive farming systems and incentivising the introduction of these practices on unsustainable intensive farming systems.
O’Donnell also said the “unfairness of the Greening Scheme” must also be addressed during the transition period, claiming that, under the scheme, one farmer gets €48 per hectare for the retention of permanent grassland and another gets €210 per hectare for carrying out the same measure.
The department needs to transition all farmers towards the replacement for Greening which is the eco-scheme where financial support will be outside of the convergence process.
Concluding, O’Donnell said: “The 3,000 farmers currently locked out of the GLAS scheme must be catered for with an environmental scheme available to them during the transition period.”