IFA President accuses Agriculture Minister of hiding facts on CAP reform

IFA President, John Bryan.

Published on 11/03/2013 15:42

IFA President, John Bryan, has accused the Minister of Agriculture Simon Coveney of hiding the facts on CAP Reform from farmers by refusing to divulge the extent of the Single Farm Payment losses they will incur as a result of new proposals he put forward at the recent Council of Ministers meeting in Brussels.

“Recent media reports suggest the Minister has briefed his backbench colleagues, but warned them not to reveal the details of the discussion. Thousands of the country’s most productive farmers, whose Single Farm Payment will be decimated by the proposals, have a right to know the implications of what he is negotiating. The Minister cannot keep farmers in the dark,” said the IFA President.

He challenged the Minister to come clean and accurately spell out in detail the combined SFP payment losses arising from these CAP Reform proposals.

The IFA leader said Minister Coveney’s new proposal for a minimum payment system seriously undermined his original position on approximation.

In a clear warning to Minister Coveney, Mr Bryan said it was totally unacceptable that thousands of farmers could lose up to 40% or more on their existing SFP by 2019.

“From the outset, IFA has opposed Commissioner Ciolos’ proposals on flattening and regionalisation. Minister Coveney is conceding way too much in a bid to secure an EU deal in these negotiations. Irish farmers expect him to toughen his stance and defend their interests now in advance of any final discussions.”

Mr Bryan said the IFA has argued strongly that objective criteria such as stocking rates and labour units must be the basis of minimising losses for productive farmers.

He said, “IFA is not opposed to some level of redistribution, but it must be implemented using objective criteria and targeted at active productive farmers.”

News

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

IFA President accuses Agriculture Minister of hiding facts on CAP reform

Top stories

News