Scots agri-environment wrangle
Scots agri-environment wrangle
By Shelley Wright
ABOUT 120 Scottish farmers involved in a financial wrangle over an EU agri-environment scheme have been advised to seek compensation to cover their losses.
The dispute was caused by the Scottish Executives misinterpretation of the schemes rules.
Affected farmers are mainly those who received payments for removing some sheep as part of their agreements under the old Heather Moorland Scheme (subsequently transferred to the new Countryside Premium Scheme). Until last year, the Scottish Executive advised that although the quota for the sheep taken from the land could not be sold or leased, it could be used to make sheep annual premium scheme claims for ewe hoggs already on the farms.
But, last summer, it discovered that this was illegal and that the £450,000 EU contribution to the schemes would have to be repaid.
Discussions between farm minister Ross Finnie and EU officials are ongoing, with the minister trying to persuade Brussels that repayment should come from the Scottish Executive rather than clawing it back from producers. If he fails, however, farmers will have to pick up the bill.
Mr Finnie told the Scottish NFU annual meeting in Aviemore last Friday that those who could show their losses would be entitled to compensation.
But for producers like George Mitchell, who has a tenancy on the 500-acre Ashentrool farm, near Dunblane, any eventual compensation may come too late.
Mr Mitchell, who runs 354 breeding ewes, says he is only two weeks away from insolvency. CPS payments, which all 120 farmers were expecting last October, have been withheld because of the Brussels ruling. In Mr Mitchells case, that amounts to £6,755, wrecking his budget forecast and forcing him to extend an existing overdraft until the end of March. "The sheep are all I have. That is my entire business – I have nothing else to sell. The bank manager has been okay up to now, but who knows for how much longer?"
He, like many others, insist that their agri-environment agreements are contracts which the government must honour, one way or another. *