Pat Deering (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister and members of the committee for their co-operation. This has been a very important meeting and I thank everybody for being present today.

As I see it, we have a short, medium and long-term problem. In the short term, the problem is the availability of fodder and the medium-term problem is the availability of credit. With that in mind, it is important that the Minister is meeting the representatives of the pillar banks and the co-operatives. They have an important role to play. A point that did not come up today in the course of the debate, is that some of the milk co-operatives in particular are talking about reducing the price paid to producers in the next period. I ask the Minister to note the request from the joint committee that the co-operatives should hold back on that. The fodder crisis has become a national as opposed to a regional problem in the past number of weeks. The more productive and intensive farmers in the south, and south eastern part of the country would have been supplying the fodder for the whole of the country and in particular up to more recent times and their difficulties could be compounded if they are not in a position to be able to produce extra fodder for the coming year because of the lack of cashflow. That issue must be addressed.

We must take a long-term view of the level of stock and how we deal with such crisis in the future. I think the Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine has an important role to play in that regard. Let me put a suggestion to members of the committee; I think we should invite Teagasc, the co-operatives and the pillar banks to appear before the committee in the very near future to discuss how we deal with the issues and to put a structure in place so that we will not have to have crisis meetings in the event of particular difficulties arising; that we will learn the lessons and have a definite structure in place to deal with difficulties in the future.

It has been a difficult time for everybody. There is no part of the country that has escaped in recent times. I think it was President Obama who said that after the winter will come the spring. I think he was right and I hope it will be sooner rather than later.