A meeting of farm organisations and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine will take place today (Tuesday, July 2), with sources indicating a new Farmers’ Charter could be agreed.
However, the meeting will take place in an environment of concern over whether farmers who have been overpaid on the Agri Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES) will have that money clawed back through their Areas of Natural Constraint (ANC) Scheme payments.
The Farmers’ Charter is a set of guidelines outlining how the department interacts with farmers on a number of issues, including scheme payments and farm inspections.
Negotiations on a new charter, to coincide with the current Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), have been ongoing for over a year, and now it appears that a final agreement is imminent.
It is understood that Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Charlie McConalogue will attend today’s meeting in person. Normally, the minister is represented by department officials at these Farmers’ Charter meetings.
The meeting in Dublin today is expected to get underway at around 4:00p.m.
However, the agreement of the charter is expected to take a back seat to the ACRES issue, which farm organisations are expected to flag to the minister or his officials.
It is understood that, when farmers in the Co-operation Project (CP) stream of ACRES were paid an interim payment of €5,000 in March, the payment was made without reference to the scorecards on which payment was originally intended to be based.
That payment, along with a payment of €4,000 to farmers in the General stream of ACRES, was made to farmers who were yet to receive payment at the time, due to delays by the department in processing payments.
Speaking to Agriland on the issue, Vincent Roddy, president of the Irish Natura and Hill Farmers’ Association (INHFA) said that, as the payments were made regardless of farmers’ habitat scores in the CP stream, there was no opportunity for the department to determine if a farmer was overpaid, and no opportunity for the farmer to see that they were overpaid and informing the department.
Typically, when an overpayment occurs, the money is clawed back at the next payment run, even if the next payment run is in a different scheme. If that rule is applied, overpayments in ACRES will be clawed back from ANC Scheme payments, which are due to be made in September.
However, according to Roddy, the farm organisations will be calling for ACRES clawbacks to be “ringfenced” within ACRES so recoupments are not made on ANC or any other payment.
The Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers’ Association (ICSA) has called for the department to address the classification of ACRES interim payments as ‘overpayments’ as a matter of urgency.
“The system adopted by the department to manage ACRES payments has classified interim payments as overpayments, which means payments from all other schemes have been, and still are, at risk of being seized in an attempt to claw back these alleged overpayments,” ICSA president Sean McNamara said.
“This is a ludicrous situation that needs to be rectified,” he added.
“The department’s system is flagging interim payments as overpayments in cases where the exact value of delayed ACRES payments has not yet been calculated.
“Consequently, the system is reclaiming funds from payments for other schemes as they become due and will continue to do so for future payments from all other schemes,” McNamara said.
The ICSA president commented: “Unfortunately, the debacle over ACRES payments still appears to have no end, and this latest calamity is just adding insult to injury. There is no justification for seizing farmers’ payments for other schemes just because [the department] made such a mess of ACRES payments.”