Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that Deputy Ó Cuív may have had other business to attend to earlier but I already had a discussion with Deputy Martin Kenny on the reference years issue. It is not fair to say that the reference years are an anachronism because the system has moved so much in terms of convergence. In fact, in the period of the current CAP, more than €100 million will have moved from farmers with a higher than average per hectare payment to farmers with a lower than average per hectare payment. There is a requirement in the current draft proposals to get to a situation where every farmer has at least 75% of the average per hectare payment in the lifetime of the next CAP. We are on a journey that is going to see greater convergence and equalisation and I do not have any difficulty with that in principle. The Deputy asked a very simple question as to whether I am in favour of capping, which I am. I do not have a difficulty with the new proposals on that. However, I am engaged in a process of consultation and in that context, it would be unfair to be overly prescriptive about my own views on this. We are doing a SWOT analysis now and we will be doing a needs assessment of what would be best for us in the future. We will have an ex anteevaluation of both of those processes before we complete our CAP strategic plan.

As a general principle, I do not have a problem with convergence and capping. That said, we need to be careful about unintended consequences. There was an issue during the term of the last CAP in the context of convergence, whereby some people had a high per hectare payment but a low gross payment. Some farmers found that their payment of €12,000 or €13,000 went down while payments to others with a big gross payment of €20,000, €30,000 or €40,000 went up because they had a low per hectare payment. We need to avoid unintended consequences in our quest to have a fairer CAP.

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