Everybody knows that the EU farm subsidy system is a joke.
he dogs in the streets of Brussels know it as they watch the bureaucrats shuttle back and forth over endless days and nights of torturous negotiations.
The billionaires like Larry Goodman, whose farms still pull in over €400,000 annually, know it.
Whether he ever gets another red cent out of the gravy train that has been the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the last 40 years won’t matter a jot to him.
His farm payments are mere rounding errors in the overall accounts of the Goodman empire.
As they are to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, who also rakes in hundreds of thousands of euro every year. For a lad with 11 digits in his net worth, it’s literally small change.
Bear in mind that these payments are supposed to guarantee food security and a fair standard of living for EU farmers.
But galling as it may be to see the millions squandered on the billionaires, what’s even more scandalous are the billions squandered on the millions of mere mortals of the agricultural world.
Farmers struggling to make a minimum wage know the subs are a joke, because even with the subsidies, they are still struggling.
The big dairy farmers also know it’s a joke because the subsidies don’t really affect their bottom line.
They know that if the subs disappeared in the morning, the rental rates on land, the fertiliser price, the price of antibiotics, and the price of almost every single agricultural input would fall.
Because all the landowners and merchants have also been in on the joke for years at this stage. They know that they can simply factor the €100/acre that most farmers get into whatever they are supplying.
That works on both the supply and purchasing side.
How else are beef factories able to convince farmers to keep supplying stock at below the cost of production?
The figures have been calculated over and over again by Teagasc, and they always show the same thing — that many beef farmers are actually handing part of their subsidy over to...(wait for it) the Larry Goodmans of the beef world!
Like I’ve been saying, it’s a joke, with sick little twists in it for good measure.
What’s really amazing is that the Irish taxpayer, who will be out on the street rioting over a €150 water charge aimed at fixing the chronic wastage in that system, couldn’t give a fiddlers about the €55bn being wasted on farm subsidies.
So the current move to morph the payments into rewards for environmental measures can’t happen fast enough.
Farm leaders’ whinging about the impact on ‘productive agriculture’ just sounds so hollow.
A subsidy based on what you produced 20 years ago is lunacy of the highest order.
Trying to protect that system now does nothing to protect any ‘productive’ farmer’s income.
It only perpetuates the woeful inequality that has developed within the sector where some lad was getting €500/acre while the fella down the road was supposed to be grateful for €50/acre.
But I’ve given up on hearing anything constructive from our farming organisations on this issue because they are locked in the political prisons they have made for themselves.
If they come out with anything that is seen to take money away from any of their members, they are ‘selling out’, regardless of the logic of the suggestion.
Instead, they trot out the same platitudes that are often patent nonsense.
The IFA claimed for years that they’d settle for nothing except ‘upwards-only convergence’. In lay man’s terms this meant having your cake and eating it, and completely ignored the fact that there are far more pressing demands on EU taxpayers’ money than lining the pockets of landowners too lazy to bother making a living outside of the subsidy system.
You’ll also hear lots of whining about the fact that the CAP payments were meant to guarantee food security, and protect farm incomes. The fact that it has failed to protect farm incomes, and there are no food shortages in the likes of New Zealand, Australia and huge other tracts of the world that don’t have a CAP subsidy regime appears to be beside the point.
So to Brussels I say: please get on with a real reform of the payment system that reflects the modern environmental and sustainability challenges in agriculture, not the food security and price control issues of the last century.
To do this, almost all the noise emanating from Ireland must be ignored, in favour of focusing on a logical use of our taxes. Merci beaucoup und auf wiedersehen.
