The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) will take part in a protest in Brussels next month against the EU’s current approach to climate policy.
The protest will see farm organisations from across the EU descend on the Belgian capital, which is the home of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council.
The demonstrations will take place on December 13 and 14.
The ICMSA says that the action is being organised by a coalition of farm organisations “demanding a fair agricultural and climate policy, and rejecting the idea that these issues can be formulated over the heads of the farmers involved”.
Among the groups that are behind the protest is the EU-wide dairy farmers lobby group the European Milk Board (EMB).
The groups involved have together issued a statement setting out the challenges that “forces them onto the Brussels streets on those dates”.
The ICMSA is the Irish representative on the EMB. Its president, Pat McCormack, has confirmed that he will lead a delegation to attend what he described as “a powerful statement by the dominant French and German groups that they, too, have had enough of being made to carry the carbon can”.
“This is the European manifestation of the exact same frustration that we feel in Ireland where farmers – and only, it seems, farmers – are being told that they will have to pay everyone else’s fare on the journey to lower emissions farming and food production.
“We subsidised everyone’s food bills for three decades through the ‘Cheap Food’ policy and now, as that comes to an end due to climate change, we see our costs hiked drastically without any corresponding increase in prices or aid we receive. It won’t work because it can’t work,” McCormack argued.
He noted that, increasingly, the “lead in these matters was going to be set at EU level”; and that “Ireland’s strange reluctance to ask consumers to start paying the real economic and environmental costs of their food is going to become cruelly exposed”.
A joint statement by the organisers of the protest, issued this morning, said: “EU citizens depend on us farmers for their food supply. And it became especially evident during the pandemic that we producers fulfil this task in a highly reliable and responsible way.
“Despite this, farmers themselves are under ever-increasing pressure. Due to serious mistakes that were made in the past, the current agricultural system is already incapable of providing prices that ensure appropriate production cost-coverage,” the statement added.