The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) has called for the European Commission to make a decision on choosing to “reform margins in the food supply chain or increase direct supports to farmers”.
The association’s president Denis Drennan made the comments following President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen addressing members of the European Parliament today (Thursday, July 18).
Drennan said that Ursula von der Leyen’s remarks in which she referenced “a new European strategy for our agriculture and food sector” could not be taken seriously until such point as the European Commission “finally chooses to either fundamentally reform margins in the food supply chain or increase direct supports to farmers without attaching expensive environmental conditions”.
Drennan said that this was the “fundamental binary decision” that faced von der Leyen and her commission.
He added this was “precisely the same way that it had faced the previous three presidents of the commission, without the decision ever being made”.
The ICMSA president said “this disabling political cowardice” accelerated the decline of the EU’s indigenous farming sector, specifically the family-based farming model.
Drennan said: “Under Ms von der Leyen’s commission and under the present Irish government, the value of the Irish dairy sector, the jewel in our agri crown, has collapsed by around 40% in just three or four years.
“The average Irish dairy farmer milking 90-odd cows is now coming out with half the minimum hourly wage set by the state. That’s the legacy of her commission’s last ‘European strategy for our agriculture and food’.
“Her choice remains what it always has been: either legislate and regulate for fair margins from the retail corporations and face down their intimidation and threats of consumer inflation or increase direct supports to the farmers and decouple those payments from the environmental regulations that have effectively devalued the payments to the point of irrelevance.
“Those are her choices now and they have been the choices facing the commission for a decade. If the EU wants sustainable food, then it’s going to have to pay a sustainable price,” Drennan said.