“Ireland will effectively have two budgets this year: one financial and one climate-related; at this stage, the latter is as important as the former,” according to the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA).
Because of this, the ICMSA president Pat McCormack has said that Budget 2022 will have to offer “serious practical help to the state’s 100,000 odd farming families” as the sector prepares to transition to lower emissions and more climate-efficient production.
Speaking after meetings with Minister for Finance Paschal Donohue and Minister for Public Expenditure Michael McGrath, McCormack said that the farm organisation had made “very specific and targeted proposals across taxation, environment and farm schemes that will move the position forward in a rational, cost-efficient and measured way”.
‘Effectively two budgets this year’
“It [is] up now to Ministers Donohoe and McGrath to examine and weigh the undoubted benefits that would flow from accepting and implementing the proposals, or to continue the current government policy of loading more and more regulation onto farmers while simultaneously cutting the levels of practical support and funding,” he said.
“Ireland will effectively have two budgets this year: one financial and one climate-related; at this stage, the latter is as important as the former.
“By the end of the year, there will a great deal more detail about what needs to be done and by what stage. Farmers are braced to take up the challenge, but that is going to require active and practical help.”
McCormack said that the organisation has outlined how it thinks that help should be structured, “but the most important thing is that the government realises that somehow standing back and watching is not an option here”.
“Only they can give this the momentum to move it forward and we’ve given them a suite of measures that we think will provide some of that momentum,” McCormack added.
ICMSA budget proposals
The ICMSA has again called for a Farm Management Deposit Scheme “that is a revenue-approved method of dealing with utterly destructive income volatility allowing farmers to deposit money in good years and access it in bad”.
The organisation has also called for a “widening of taxation bands and 3% stamp duty on the sale of agricultural land”.
On the environment, the organisation wants no VAT on Low Emission Slurry Spreading (LESS) equipment, as well as a 60% grant on LESS equipment and other environmental investments purchased through a “properly-funded” TAMS II.
Continuing that theme, a rebate system “should be introduced to encourage the switch” from CAN to protected urea.
The organisation said it thinks that a “reformed and funded agri-environment scheme could attract an additional 10,000 participants next year”.
Meanwhile, a payments ‘break’ for farmers suffering from outbreaks of bovine TB “would cost paltry sums and would function along the lines of the Covid-19 payment breaks that so proved their worth recently”.
The organisation has also called for “short-term incapacitation benefits to be extended to the self-employed so that farmers – the most dangerous occupation in Ireland – can enjoy similar levels of social protection to those available to workers in other much less dangerous sectors”.