Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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449. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the specific actions he is planning and the timeline for the greater use of dairy futures markets as a tool to allow farmers to hedge against increasingly volatile prices. [14912/17]

Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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The dairy sector has in the recent past been through a prolonged period of downward price volatility.  As Minister, I have been an advocate of deploying the market measures utilised by the Commission,  such as Aids to Private Storage and Intervention.  Additionally, the Common Market Organisation Regulations agreed by the Irish EU Presidency in 2013 provides for more flexible "exceptional measures, " such as those deployed during the most recent dairy market crisis. These included the provision of direct aid  to farmers, the voluntary production reduction scheme and the €11 million in funding that facilitated the creation of a €150 million low interest loan fund for farmers.

At the same time, I have at all times stressed the need to take a longer-term view in addressing price volatility. While there is no single silver bullet existing measures need to be added to through adoption of new innovations, not just by Member States or the Commission, but also by industry.

With specific reference to futures markets, which are used successfully in other regional dairy markets such as the United States and New Zealand, the recent report of the Agriculture Markets Task Force to Commissioner Hogan noted that such instruments certainly had a role to play but were underdeveloped in the EU dairy sector compared to, for instance, the cereals sector.

It must be noted that such initiatives typically have a long lead in time to gain industry and stakeholder acceptance as a viable way to mitigate volatility and that the driving force behind any such futures market development in the EU and Ireland must be industry-led.

I have facilitated discussion on such an intiative at the dairy forum and I am aware of some exploratory work under way in Ireland on the creation of a dairy price index and I would encourage industry players to continue with this important work.