Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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If people ask me questions I would like to answer them. There are different definitions of "active farmers" and this is one of the most difficult things to get right. To have a common legal definition of an active farmer across 27 - soon to be 28 - countries is very difficult. The Commission has said it would categorise active farmers as those having more than 5% of their income coming from farming. That is not a very sensible proposal. In the Council we have set a minimum level of activity for areas that are being farmed to qualify that land for payments, to ensure it is being actively farmed and the Parliament has a variant of that. We are trying to get that right because we obviously want to ensure payments are targeted at active farming, despite what Deputy Ó Cuív says.

We have not come to sugar in the trialogues yet but I want to hold strongly to my position in the Council, for which support was hard-won, that we should phase out sugar quotas by 2017 at the latest. Countries such as Ireland, Slovenia and Portugal which may consider getting back into sugar processing should be entitled to do that. The Commission's proposal is 2015, the Parliament's proposal is 2020, so the Council position, which is somewhere in the middle, is something I hope we can get agreement on. A portion of rural development funds will be set aside for future Leader programmes, although the structure of Leader companies may change fundamentally before then.

Many people are speaking up for small farmers and young farmers because most countries, especially newer member states, have a lot of small farmers, so that is a very strong part of the equation. Even in terms of aspects such as contributing towards crisis funds in case of problems such as a collapse in price, we are supporting strong arguments that farmers who earn below a certain amount of money from the CAP system would not have to contribute to that crisis fund.

There is a great deal of positive discrimination, therefore, in favour of small farmers. In Ireland, the debate often gets confused when people pit small farmers against big farmers. The way in which the calculation is made is as a payment per hectare under direct payments and for the highest and lowest paid farmers, the average farm size is similar right the way through the spectrum. They are all in and around 30 to 35 hectares.