Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein)

The proposals contained in the CAP document published yesterday in Brussels, if accepted and implemented in full, will be hugely damaging to the agricultural sector in Ireland. They will damage the viability of family farms and undermine the potential within the agricultural and farming community. As such, I welcome the Minister's commitment that he will seek to ensure that no changes to the CAP budget or structures will impair the implementation of the Food Harvest 2020 report. I assure the Minister, on behalf of Sinn Féin, that we will fully support him in his efforts to ensure CAP benefits to Irish farmers are retained.

The Minister must also ensure that any changes do not introduce further delays and red tape which would impede farmers in drawing down their entitlements. That type of bureaucracy has been one of the most common causes for complaint from farmers in recent years, although it would seem the delays are often due to hold-ups within the Department rather than in Brussels. I am interested in the Minister's reference to his proposal that individual members states should be allowed to shape their own payment models. Will he clarify whether this implies a different method of payment in regard to the regularity of cheques or a more radical change in the administration of the single farm payment?

My party has made several proposals regarding the overall structure of the single farm payment scheme in terms of modulation, which effectively amounts to a gradual decrease in payments, and in regard to a limit on the amount of money that can be received by any one recipient. In many cases the largest payments go to agribusinesses rather than actual farmers. The maintenance of active farming as a means of production is of great importance to our food security as well as to the broader economy.

There is a great disparity in how the single farm payment is distributed. In a report I produced some years ago for the former Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture and Food, I pointed out that 68% of farmers were receiving less than €10,000 under the scheme, which accounted for 28% of the total payments made. On average, the bottom 68% received a payment of €4,057 compared with an average of €22,170 for the top 32% of recipients. The disparity in payments was even starker when one took into account that 55,312 farmers, representing more than 44% of all recipients, received less than €5,000, accounting for just 10.5% of the total. By contrast, the 2,092,or 1.7%, of farmers who received more than €50,000 accounted for €154 million, an average payment of €73,500 and 12.6% of the total fund. The largest single payment was of more than €500,000.

While it can be argued that this disparity merely reflects the differences in farm scale and production, it also indicates that many farmers are at risk of being forced out of farming. That undermines the whole basis of the CAP, which is to protect the European model of farming based on family farms. The proposals being put forward will wipe out a huge section of the rural population, impacting in particular on small family farmers who are struggling to survive in current circumstances. As I said, the Minister will have the full support of my party in seeking to protect these farmers. I come from a small family farm background myself and am conscious of the contribution the family farm has made to our communities, society and economy. Its survival into the future in a viable way is of great importance from a social, economic and community perspective. I am a strong supporter of positive discrimination towards smaller, weaker farmers in order to ensure their survival and continued viability. We must all put our shoulder to the wheel in an effort to secure the future prosperity of the sector.

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