Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 13 April 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Fixed-Price Milk Contracts: Irish Co-operative Organisation Society

Mr. T.J. Flanagan:

To add to that, as we mentioned earlier and the Chairman acknowledged, the greatest single driver for the high level of adoption of fixed milk price schemes was pressure from financial institutions, without wishing to generalise. Certainly, that is the case from the anecdotes that we have heard. The farmers that have been talking to us and those we have met through farmer organisations are people who have expanded fairly substantially. They were quite heavily leveraged and were put under fairly significant pressure by the banks to de-risk the lending. I think it is probably unfair that the banks are not in here to be part of the solution as well, given that they drove the adoption of these schemes. My understanding is that the biggest concern for the farmers who are unfortunately caught in this cost price squeeze at the moment is bank repayments. Certainly, the banks can be part of the solution as well.

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