Vital CAP ‘more good than bad’ says Irish minister
Reform of the CAP reflects global challenges and European priorities, Ireland’s agriculture minister Simon Coveney has told Oxford Farming Conference delegates.
Mr Coveney said there had been “more good than bad” about the CAP during the past 50 years and the changes were vital for supporting sustainable intensification of agriculture.
He said the minimum 30% of a member state’s national envelope to be used for environmental schemes provided a benchmark for sustainability in farming.
“The greening of the CAP is reasonably ambitious without going over the top. It will guarantee a basic level of environmental responsibility,” Mr Coveney said.
“We should welcome it rather than see it as increased bureaucracy, as it has been kept easy to implement, particularly in Ireland and the UK.”
Mr Coveney, who led the council of agricultural ministers through CAP negotiations under Ireland’s presidency of the EU, hailed the new agenda of simplification.
“We don’t want to tie farmers up in bureaucracy, form-filling, inspections, reporting, audits and all the things farmers hate,” he said.
“This means less time in the office and more time doing what they want to do and what they do best.”
He said the most exciting element of the CAP was the move away from the protectionism of the past into a more global-orientated marketplace.
However, there would be a move away from regular involvement in the market by the EU, even in the post-quota world of potentially volatile prices, he said.
“It will be more about crisis management when there is a collapse in the marketplace than about every day market intervention, which is what we have seen in the past,” Mr Coveney said.
He added that agricultural production should now focus on the global market.
By 2050 there will be a population of 9bn globally with higher incomes and food consumption, which will offer great scope for agricultural expansion and trade, he said.
But this will take place while farmland and water are becoming more scarce and countries have to hit new carbon emissions targets.
Because of this, trade and sharing of technology and expertise across the world were essential, he said.
“These are extraordinary challenges as well as extraordinary opportunities,” he told the conference.
“The idea that we can build a wall around our countries, produce food in a way we are comfortable with, in quantities we are comfortable with, and expect that we will be able to import the food we need from other parts of the world – that assumption is a fallacy.”
Mr Coveney described the ambitious plan for agricultural expansion in Ireland as something the UK could follow.
The Irish Food Harvest 2020 plan outlines the route for growth on a quarterly basis each year and, in four years, the value of Irish food and drink exports has increased by 40%, amid a reduction across the developing world.
Mr Coveney said the “special relationship” between Ireland and the UK, which trade €7bn of goods each year, needed to continue by sharing technology, innovation and ambition.
“We are at the start of a golden era for agriculture and agri-food in Ireland and, in my view, also for other parts of Europe that want to buy into that vision,” he said.
“In the UK you have the capacity, as we do, to produce vast quantities of food, to do it in a sustainable way and to prove it through audit systems.
“We need to do that for the business opportunity that is there and the moral obligation to show internationally how we produce high-quality, sustainable food.”
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