Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)

This issue was debated in some detail last night and on which I agree with the Deputy. We need to find a way to allow the dairy industry to expand before 2015 when the European Union wide quota system ends. We have many young and not so young farmers in many counties who have the capacity to significantly increase milk output. They are doing so already at levels dangerously above their quota allocations in the expectation that they will get away with it this year because they got away with it last year. While we need to encourage expansion and growth, unfortunately under the rules of the milk check agreement, Ireland is only being given an additional 1% milk quota each year until 2015. That is nowhere near being sufficient to allow us to expand in the way we would like to over the next five years. So the Food Harvest 2020 target of a 50% increase in milk production by 2020 will, at the moment, require a massive expansion in the five years from 2015 to 2020 due to the restrictions before 2015. We are trying to find a political solution to that problem because many EU countries are under quota. We would like to see what the Deputy has called for, which is an EU-wide quota, so that when some countries are under quota others that wish to be over quota would be given the flexibility. That is not a runner politically at the moment, however, in the European Commission or in Germany and France. I am in the process of trying to put together a coalition of countries in order to find some kind of political resolution to this matter.

In the past year, both Denmark and the Netherlands have had significant super-levy fines applied to them for being over quota. We were less than 1% under quota and only just made it. There are four or five EU countries that want to expand their dairy industries and which need the flexibility to do so, but it will be a significant political challenge in order to be successful. All farmers that are planning milk production above the quota allocated to them should be careful before choosing to do so because we are in danger of being over quota this year.

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