Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

A debate like this can often be taken up by the minutiae of subsidy regimes, quotas and CAP reform but a bigger picture can be lost if a debate like this is confined to such narrow terms. The Department of Social Protection reported in 2013 that one in ten persons in this State was experiencing food poverty. The European Federation of Food Banks likewise reported food poverty rates of 9.6% across the European Union in 2014 and they were applying the same definition as the Department of Social Protection. In addition, the European Federation of Food Banks states that a further 14.8% of the EU's population is at risk of food poverty. I need not illustrate the point further by venturing into the global south, where the rates of food poverty and starvation are far greater again. In spite of this, the main crisis occupying the agriculture Ministers across the EU happens to be a crisis of overproduction, particularly in the dairy and pigmeat sectors.

To focus on the dairy sector specifically, former Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Phil Hogan, who now occupies the position of EU Agriculture and Rural Development Commissioner of Agriculture, promoted with some fanfare last year the lifting of milk quotas and put forward a perspective that small and medium-sized dairy farms in Ireland could now upscale in an era where the sky would be the limit. However, the weak predictive powers he had on display when he was Minister responsible for water charges are now fully on display in the European arena. Hardly a few months had passed from the lifting of the quotas when the Putin regime in Russia announced its embargo on EU dairy products, leaving those farmers who borrowed to expand their dairy farms high and dry. Without a hint of humility, Commissioner Hogan, in his address to the EU agriculture Ministers last week, said that the lifting of the quotas was always going to lead to volatility in the market.

Rather than admit defeat and return to the quota system, the Commission has announced a series of supports and exceptional measures for storage of surpluses.

The very desirability of expanding dairy and meat production with a view to encouraging exports outside of the EU has to be challenged from an environmental perspective. The active encouragement by the Minister, Deputy Coveney, and the Commissioner, Mr. Hogan, of dairy farmers in this country to expand their production flew in the face of the necessity for Ireland, like every advanced country, to lower its greenhouse gas emissions - something from which the Taoiseach disgracefully sought to exempt Ireland at the Paris conference last December. Trade agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP, which, if passed, will have a major bearing on agribusiness, will likewise serve to encourage a global increase in air miles and the ludicrous situation of identical food products crossing each other's paths on the high seas and in the skies, contributing to the wrecking of the planet. Yet such an intensification of global competition is underpinned by an obscene EU agricultural promotional budget of €111 million.

We need an absolute break from the capitalist mode of agriculture, which benefits big business the most. The website farmsubsidy.ieprovides the startling figure that the main beneficiaries of the current subsidy system are not the small farmers who are most vulnerable to the chaos of the market. Rather, it is the multinational giant Greencore that has gained the most - €88 million to date. In fact, all of the largest beneficiaries are in the big business sector. What is needed is a national, Europe-wide and global plan for food and timber production that puts people and the environment first. It is entirely technically feasible to rationally plan agriculture, fishing and timber production in a manner that can eliminate food poverty and provide a decent diet for all as well as a living income for small family-based farms and for workers engaged in primary economic activity the world over. However, while food production remains concentrated in the hands of agribusinesses, which benefit most from the current dispensation, and while the political establishment in Europe remains wedded to supporting what is a fundamentally capitalist model of food production, with a system of subsidies that does not guarantee a living income for farmers with small or medium-sized holdings, we will continue to have the perversion of food poverty co-existing with overproduction, alongside the destruction of the environment, which hurts most those countries that already experience the worst in food poverty.

The Anti-Austerity Alliance rejects the stereotype that places the radical left in opposition to the farming community. We support a living and secure income for those with small and medium-sized farms, and the type of socialist planning that I describe is the best way to achieve that. However, at the top of food production, agribusiness has fused entirely with the capitalist mode of production and, here and the world over, has to be taken into democratic public ownership as an essential service to the public.

See this speech in context