North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Salt of the Earth

Never mind the bullocks...Happy farmers or sad farmers, same end result for these fellows#

There's a birthday bash in the RDS this evening, with President Mary McAleese as the honoured guest. The Irish Farmers Association was founded 60 years ago* and two and a half thousand alumni of the organization will tuck into a big dinner, hear a few speeches and be subjected to the Three Irish Tenors.

The IFA came of age when they led thirty thousand farmers on a march to Dublin in 1966 to protest about farm prices. When they arrived in Dublin, the Minister of Agriculture refused to meet them, so the farmers laid siege to Government buildings for 20 days. That Minister was Charles Haughey who was nothing if not a pragmatist - he eventually met the farm leaders, made a few promises and got his Department building back.

Farmers in Ireland have seen a dramatic change of fortune in the last sixty years - back in 1955, farmers exported twice as much rabbit meat as they did sheep, imported about 5,000 tonnes of butter and almost all agricultural trade was with one country, Britain. That all changed with Ireland's accession to the EEC in 1972. Production increased dramatically - in 1955, an Irish farmer produced enough food to feed about seven people (about 30% of farm output back then was consumed by the farmers' own families) but by the mid-Nineties, an Irish farmer could produce enough food to feed about 50 people**. And therein lay the problem.

As each new country joined the EEC (or later the EU), their farming industry became more efficient, and produced more. For an individual farmer, it was a great situation. Prices were guaranteed, and fixed at a level that made farming a lucrative occupation for large farmers, and a viable one for even small holdings. Thousands of Irish farmers working 100 acres or less could not survive with subsidies, and even on poor land (particularly in the west of Ireland), the per-animal subsidies resulted in millions of sheep subsisting on the most barren and forsaken of land. The downside was that the schemes cost an absolute fortune, and predominately industrial countries (such as the UK and Germany) objected to having to subsidize farmers in France and other countries. Mainly France, though.

The other problem was that the surplus food had to be stored - the so-called "butter mountain", "wine lake" etc. And just like there is only so long that you can leave a steak in the freezer, a lot of the surplus food was either destroyed, sold off at low-cost to places like Russia or used in aid programmes. The Beef Tribunal back in the Nineties unearthed no end of 'irregularities' in the involvement of Irish meat processors in a beef export programme to Russia - though funnily enough, no-one was punished for it.

The backlash began with the milk "super levy" - which effectively fined farmers if they produced above a certain number of gallons of milk per year. [This was the event that drove my own family out of dairy farming]. The IFA, through lobbying in Ireland and Brussels, managed to get a form of exemption (long term farmers were able to produce at near maximum production) for Ireland.

In recent years, other quotas have been introduced, and each year, more and more farmers leave the industry; i.e they retire and their children choose another career (the EU introduced a farmers retirement scheme which sped up that process). The latest curb on agricultural subsidies is a scheme called "De-coupling". From the beginning of this year, EU grants are decoupled (I.e. separated) from the amount of output that a farmer produces. So a farmer that produced 100 head of cattle, for example, and received a subsidy of 5000 euros (50 euro per head) in return last year would receive the same subsidy this year, irrespective of the number of cattle that he produces. What? Sounds like money for old rope?

Well, not quite. The de-coupling means that there is no incentive for farmers to produce more food, since producing more grain or more cattle or sheep won't attract any subsidy. Since it is unprofitable to produce more agricultural output without subsidy, it's likely that most of them will reduce production. Their income is effectively frozen at a level determined by the EU. If the income remains at the same level, inflation will effectively reduce the income level over time. But no-one expects even the de-coupled subsidies to remain in operation for more than a couple of years. Once the wrangling at the World Trade Organisation is done, the EU will probably permit developing nations in Africa and Asia to sell agricultural produce into the EU market. Low cost food from developing nations will do three things; firstly, it will dramatically improve the economies of poor countries which is generally a good thing; secondly, it will rapidly reduce the cost of basic foodstuffs in the EU, which would also seem a like a good thing; and thirdly, pretty much destroy the existing primary agricultural industry in the EU since it will simply be unprofitable to produce anything other than niche products. It won't destroy the food processing industry (which is far more lucrative than going the raw materials anyway) but Irish food companies will be able to import their raw materials more cheaply from Mozambique than from Meath. It would be a bitter irony that the farmers in Eastern European countries to discover that, having clamoured to join the EU to gain access to subsidized markets, the EU would much prefer their old Iron Curtain price levels.

The IFA won't disappear any time soon. There are still plenty of farmers, though many of them hold down other jobs too (de-coupling allows farmers to reduce stock levels to a point where they can do other work too). Even as farming as an industry continues to decline, farmland will still have to be managed - otherwise the west of Ireland, for a start, will become an impenetrable jungle (though at least a jungle without sheep, thank God). The various REPS schemes pays farmers in Ireland millions of euros to maintain their farms in a traditional way (I.e. maintain hedgerows rather than using barbed wire fences, etc) and these schemes will enable farmers to remain 'on the land' in some form.

One of those two and a half thousand invites for the bash tonight went to one of my own extended families, who was active in the IFA for years. He couldn't make it on the march in '66 (he had cows to milk) but his brother went instead, and had a foretaste of his future career as a chef by spending his time cooking for the marchers. Alas, he didn't get an invite. It's like being in a band - no-one remembers the drummer.

* (it was called the National Farmers Association back then)
** Stats taken from IFA website.
# I originally posted the wrong version of this photo, incase you're wondering why it changed. Original is here.

Posted by Monasette at January 6, 2005 10:15 PM