Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Commissioner and congratulate him on his appointment. We are often our own worst enemies when it comes to simplification. That includes the farm organisations. One of the reasons for the single farm payment was to get rid of the previous plethora of schemes, such as the suckler cow welfare scheme and the beef cow scheme. No sooner had that been done, however, then the farming organisations looked for additional specific schemes, which made life very complicated for smaller farmers in particular. If a small beef farmer wants to get money from the CAP, he or she has to join the basic payment scheme, the greening scheme, the GLAS scheme, the discussion group scheme and the animal health and welfare scheme. That is a considerable number of schemes to join in return for a payment of €8,000 to €10,000. The lucky boy who has the big single farm payment might get €100,000 or, in some cases, a lot more in return for simply keeping his land in good agricultural order. If we want to simplify schemes we need to reverse the inverted pyramid that we seem to have created.

It is simple for the big farmer who collects the big payment. A person who receives a payment of €100,000 can ignore all the small schemes, whereas the smaller farmer must join many schemes, each of which has conditions and paperwork. As we know, the overheads of complying with a scheme do not change because a farmer has less stock. The overhead and hassle is the same whether one has 10 or 100 cows. In fact a larger farmer is more likely to computerise.

Countries such as Poland have a large number of very small farmers and a small number of very big farmers. Although the average farm size in Poland is tiny, there are also many very large farms. Throughout Europe, including Italy, there is a very large number of small farms. I often wonder whether it would be simpler if all those small farmers had the option of one scheme through which they could claim their money leaving all the complications for the large farmers who have the resources to comply with the complications. That is not what this simplification is about. Simplification begins with a very simple idea, and then it gets into all these structures. For the majority of the people Deputy Connaughton, Senator Comiskey and I are dealing with, whatever about Deputy Deering, nothing changes or makes life simpler.

I heard the end of what the Minister said about farm safety. While it is very important we focus on it, to a certain extent it is counterintuitive, and this is understandable. Dairy farmers account for the majority of very serious accidents. A disproportionate number of fatal accidents occur among dairy farmers, and 18% of farmers account for 50% of fatal accidents. One would have thought that dairy farmers would be the most organised and disciplined for doing things right, given that they have to get the quality of milk right. Dairy farmers normally have a good cash flow and rather than introducing a massive amount of red tape and penalties among the low-risk people, we should focus on the high-risk farmers. It is understandable to a point, given that dairy farmers have much more equipment, tend to be full-time farmers and contract out less work. We do not need a sledgehammer to crack this nut. We know where the high risk is. If we could remove the high risk, we could reduce accidents, and I ask the Commissioner to consider this in any changes he might make. There is major resistance among many smaller, relatively low-risk farmers to this becoming a mandatory condition of grant payments. We need to examine this and target our efforts.

I discussed price with the Commissioner earlier today. Since I became spokesperson, I have believed that unless a farmer, after he or she strips away payments such as the single farm payment and disadvantaged areas payment, has a positive gross margin for every extra animal or unit of production, there is no encouragement to farm better, breed better and produce more. European agriculture cannot survive unless we get this fundamental piece of logic into our minds. I do not refer to fixed overheads. This is not the way it has been on a consistent basis with certain types of agriculture. This applies particularly to beef, 95% of which is sold within the EU, virtually all of which, excluding the catering trade, goes to supermarkets. Vegetables and fruits from this and many European countries are still sold within the EU as is 100% of liquid milk. I am examining this on an EU-wide basis and the issue is very important.

While I may not have always agreed with Commissioner Hogan when he was a Minister, I would laud some of the things he has spoken about since he became Commissioner, particularly the price issue. I hope a clear programme can be set out stipulating that unless farmers receive a fair return for their products, the Commissioner will try to persuade his colleagues - and I understand the challenges in doing that - that they will have two step up to the plate. Otherwise, family farming in Europe will die a slow death.

I welcome the clarity of what the Commissioner said about the beef genomics scheme. The Commissioner said any changes in the terms and conditions would apply only to those farmers who join the scheme after the programme modification has been notified to the Commission. According to the data, although only 22% of farmers with fewer than ten cows have applied for the beef genomics scheme, they account for 55% of herd owners. They are not some people over in the wilds of County Leitrim or Connemara. More than half of the herd owners of suckler cows have fewer than ten cows. Only 22% of them have applied, and I have a sneaking feeling that by Christmas half of them will have fallen at Becher's Brook and the figure could be 10%. I have asked for a county by county breakdown because I am curious about how many small herds are in places such as Kildare and Carlow. If the Minister went to the EU, could he negotiate a new genomics scheme for farmers with ten cows or fewer that would be simpler and less onerous regarding star ratings and, for example, would not require 60% of the animals to be tested? Could this scheme run parallel to the big scheme? Could the small number of farmers with fewer than ten cows who joined the beef genomics scheme jump to the small scheme? Such a scheme would suit the reality of the life of small farmers who are trying to stay in business.

Many people write off small farmers. In 1974, I went to Connemara and worked as a farmers co-op manager to start with. RTE produced a programme called "Landmark" at the time and many years later I saw myself on an episode of it filmed in 1976 or 1977. In that programme, I said there was no way we would get full-time farmers in the area to survive solely on farm income, but if we matched the farm incomes with modest off-farm incomes, we would maintain families. We successfully built up an economy around that, particularly with forestry. Small farmers are here to stay and can have a very good lifestyle if they use farming as a second income to combine with an off-farm income, which is easy to do with certain types of farming. I do not buy into the idea that small farmers are in a period of transition and are all going to disappear. I take it that it is too late to introduce a small coupled scheme for the small farmers and give them a grant for the number of animals and forget about all these conditions.