Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)

Fair play to the Deputy. He wants me to announce my budget a few months early. The reality, of course, is that I cannot give him the assurance he seeks, namely, that there will be no cuts to any of the schemes from which we make payments - REPS, AOS, disadvantaged area payments, the less favoured area scheme, LFAs, and so on. When I met the IFA yesterday I told delegates it is important to be up-front with people from the start. There will be cutbacks in our budget which will affect some schemes. We have not yet decided which schemes or at what level but the reality is that the four year budgetary framework in which I must operate involves a reduction in expenditure from €1.647 billion to €1.286 billion by my Department, from 2011 to 2012. That reduction, as published material, was available from when the last Government was in place, showing €361 million in reduction between this year and next year. Some of the reduction will be accounted for by schemes that are ending naturally in any case, for example, the waste management scheme on farms which was very capital intensive. A number of people have left REPS and gone into AOS which is not as expensive to the State.

However, even when all these issues are taken into account we are still being asked to make savings of between €150 million and €200 million, which is a lot of money. That is why we have been very serious about going through a long and difficult expenditure review process, to try to reduce the cost of delivering services from my Department and to make as much of a saving as possible. The need remains to make some savings from the schemes we operate. I want to work with farming organisations and anybody else who wants to be part of the process to decide which sectors of the farming community can shoulder some of that burden so that we can protect the more vulnerable sectors of farming.

I will make decisions based on two principles, first, to protect the lowest income farmer and people who live in the most vulnerable areas who cannot take advantage of increased prices or very strong markets, in other words, people in disadvantaged areas. Second, I want to make decisions that are consistent with the targets in the Food Harvest 2020 strategy that will allow farming to continue to expand and grow. Even if those principles are applied there will be some difficult choices to make. Some cuts will be required which will target some of the schemes to which the Deputy referred.

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