Dissatisfaction with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) and its ministers remains over a delay in payment dates this year.
Deputy president and returning officer of the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA), Brian Rushe said the IFA remains “very dissatisfied” with the DAFM’s attitude towards scheme payments.
The IFA attended a meeting of the Farmers’ Charter earlier this week, after having walked away from the charter in protest over delayed payment dates earlier this year.
Delayed payment dates
The DAFM needs to be “ambitious” and must hit the targets for payment dates in terms of the number of farmers as it did under the previous Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Rushe said.
Referring to a draft charter document, he said that the association felt that the DAFM was setting the bar “too low” for itself in terms of delivering on payments to farmers.
Under the previous CAP the DAFM committed to 90% of farmers being paid on the target dates, yet the targets contained within the draft charter “fell way short” of that, Rushe said.
However, there is a commitment in the charter to bring back those payments to the dates that farmers are used to under the previous CAP, he confirmed.
While there was nothing agreed at the meeting on Wednesday (November 1), Rushe said that talks continue and the IFA plans to attend the next meeting for which a date is yet to be set.
While he said this CAP was meant to be “simpler”, the IFA deputy president and returning officer said that it seems the DAFM is “attempting to pass the buck on to farmers”.
Farmers’ Charter
Rushe said the initial proposal to delay the payment dates, which the DAFM put on the table earlier this year, represented “a loss of ground” for farmers.
Areas of Natural Constraints (ANC) payments were delayed by one month this year, while Basic Income Support for Sustainability (BISS) payments were issued two weeks later.
“The DAFM wanted that to take pressure off themselves and to lower the expectation on themselves and lower the bar on delivery and we just deemed that unacceptable.
“They went and acted unilaterally and went behind the back inside the charter, and informed farmers ahead of the negotiation that these were the new dates being adopted,” he said.
While describing the Farmers’ Charter as “important” and “useful”, Rushe stressed that it only works well if there’s mutual respect between the DAFM and the representative bodies.
“I didn’t see any point in keeping us in a room when the DAFM at that stage showed no signs of a willingness to engage or willingness to understand the issues that we were raising,” he said.
Farmers will fill out forms and comply with whatever they’re asked to comply with, and yet they’re asked to accept later payments, he said, while no other sector of society has to do that.
“I don’t accept that the farmers should have to suffer any delay in payments or any issues regarding cheques or otherwise because of something the farmers haven’t done,” he said.