How does Ireland keep its dairy dividend? An urgent question that demands an answer
Pat On Farm In President, Mccormack, Icmsa, Tipperary Co The
ICMSA is delighted to be associated with ‘Dairyland: How Does Ireland Keep Its Dairy Dividend?’, the latest in a long line of supplements that we have produced with our old friends in the Irish Examiner.
The question itself is always interesting and worth consideration, but in late October 2023 it has acquired an urgency that means that answering it — or at least giving some signal that you understand the question — is now approaching emergency status. Put as bluntly as the scale of the challenge demands, I am deeply concerned that at exactly the time when we as both a sector and society need to be positive and proactive about the one commodity in which nature has given Ireland an incomparable advantage, we seem to be set on undermining ourselves and, in the name of some very questionable ‘environmental’ precepts, effectively dismantling the economic engine that keeps most of Ireland outside the cities and larger towns not just economically viable, but economically possible.
To non-farmer readers or those unfamiliar with the current situation, that must seem melodramatic. Actually, if anything, it’s an understatement. The Irish dairy sector — the jewel in our farming and food production crown — is in the process of being dismantled, herd by herd, restriction by restriction, measure by measure.
That process has been underway since the current Government came into power and the ground has been pre-prepared by the platform given to a whole slew of commentators and ‘activists’ whose knowledge of farming is in directly inverse proportion to the volume with which they broadcast their opinions. They seem to know nothing, but that doesn’t seem to bother them — and certainly doesn’t affect the frequency with which they are offered newspaper columns or radio shows.
At some juncture that is hard to pinpoint, the Irish State seems to have lost faith in its own ability to calculate and ‘do the hard yards’ in terms of policy development and analysis. That vital work was subcontracted or more likely, just handed over, to these ever-increasing and ever-expanding NGOs and pressure groups, most of whom were in receipt of state funding that was used usually to undermine and obstruct decided state policy at every turn. Once these groups had hijacked state policy on farming and food production, ICMSA realised that Irish farming and Irish rural communities were in serious trouble — and those fears have been borne out; we have been effectively conducting a ‘fighting retreat’ ever since.
Our best efforts notwithstanding, Irish farming suffered a serious reverse this year and Irish derogation dairy farmers suffered a perhaps fatal blow.
The decision to mount a non-defence of our Derogation and reduce from 250kg N to 220kg N per hectare is effectively a destocking measure of precisely the kind that the Government repeatedly assured Irish farmers was not on the agenda. It’s worth noting that again: the reduction to 220kg of N means either destocking or increasing land platform. Set against the raging inflation of leasing or purchasing land, the lowering of the Nitrogen limits is a compulsory destocking measure for the 3,000 farms affected — that’s how it was intended and that’s how it’s going to work. There was no defence mounted — or even attempted — by the Irish Government and that despite the fact that the data is already emerging from water improvement measures showing measurable effects. We should have asked the Commission for a ‘pause’ to allow the most recent measures to be analysed and so develop up-to-date data. But we didn’t. We are entitled to ask why, and the clear suspicion must be that the Irish Government — or elements within it — were perfectly happy to ‘jump the gun’ on this and retreat from the Derogation before we were in possession of any data that might indicate that we could stay at the rates we were at.
Of course, Irish Government restrictions are now regular and often and they never come alone. This year also saw the introduction of ‘Banding’ which will place further stocking pressures on dairy farmers already "at the end of their tether" through six months of low prices and mystifyingly high input prices.
None of that reality was allowed to intrude on the Grand Plan which seems to be a relentless week-on-week and measure-on-measure erosion of the dairy farmers that are the platform for the dairy Co-ops that are the platform for the dairy exports that are the platform for whatever degree of economic stability and predictability that rural Irish communities can enjoy.
All this should entail ICMSA and our members running up the white flag and surrendering our sector and livelihoods to the new orthodoxy. It won’t happen and it will never happen. We’ll go on arguing against this nonsense every day and with every breath and it’s not just because we know that its acceptance will mean the end of economically vibrant rural communities; it’s because we know that it is absolutely not the unarguable scientific case that it is usually presented as.
ICMSA long ago realised that this debate — and it is an existential debate for our farmer members and their communities — will have to be fought and won on data and hard facts. We can’t rely on sympathy and understanding of non-rural communities anymore; the outright propaganda and prominence afforded these ‘environmental activists’ by the general media has seen to that. We are on our own. Fine, we'll do it on our own.
We don’t want or need any favours, but we will insist on fairness. And not just fairness in terms of policy directed towards us. But fairness in terms of the way the overall debate about the interaction between farming and the Environment is to be conducted. I’ll have served 14 years in senior positions within ICMSA, whether that be Chairperson of the Dairy Committee, Deputy President or the last six years as President. For at least 10 years I have been asking publicly and repeatedly why we have never heard a senior politician make the single statement that would announce the beginning of a new era in terms of that interaction between farming and the Environment.
For that whole decade, I’ve been asking when we could expect to hear a senior Irish politician announce categorically that the era of Cheap Food was over and that consumers must now expect to pay the economic and environmental cost of the food they consume. I’ve been waiting for someone senior to announce that for 10 years. I’m still waiting. But I’ll tell you this: I’ll get an answer — and I’ll get it publicly — before I step down as President later this year.
This is one of my last editorials as President of ICMSA. I leave more convinced than ever that our futures and our livelihoods are both worth fighting for and can be won. The anti-farming fever will break and our position that the kind of environmental progress required is both possible and compatible with commercial family farming, that position will be vindicated. ICMSA will lead, as we always have done. Not by hysteria or invective; but by example and evidence.
The names may change. But the tradition, the heritage, the responsibility to look at the problem and come forward with the best workable solution for Ireland’s family farms, that will never change.
