The importance of the meeting of EU agriculture ministers tomorrow, Wednesday, May 13, has again been underlined, with the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) giving its take.

Pat McCormack, the association’s president, said that he hoped that the “overwhelmingly negative and disappointed” reaction to supports from the EU so far will have “concentrated minds among ministers”.

“The EU must have an indigenous farming sector and primary food production system capable of feeding its own population with high-quality food on a sustainable basis – that has to be the most important lesson from this episode,” McCormack stressed.

He said that ministers and EU officials had to realise “how very close to absolute disaster we had come in the first stages of the pandemic and the decisive role in averting that disaster that was provided by farmers and primary food producers”.

“It was our ability to keep fresh food in the shops all over the EU, and provide that food from within the EU, that stopped the kind of general panic that might have tipped an already panicked population into hysteria,” the ICMSA president argued.

McCormack continued: “If we haven’t learned that we must always retain the ability to feed ourselves then we’ll have learned nothing. That means a vibrant skilled commercial EU farming sector and that means that tomorrow’s council has to straighten up, get serious, and provide support.”

He said that farmers would be reassured by Minister Michael Creed’s statements that he has his 26 European counterparts “on-side” in facing the scale of the challenge.

However, McCormack highlighted that this assurance would have to be “turned into concrete actions backed with a budget”.

“Tomorrow’s council will tell it all: We’ll either know whether the EU understands and appreciates what it has, or whether it’s going to listen to those who don’t seem to think that it’s important that the EU has the ability to feed itself,” he insisted.

“Farmers have suffered serious losses due to Covid-19, and there is a clear responsibility on the council to address these losses in a fair and reasonable way,” McCormack concluded.