The debate around the next CAP is well and truly under way.

Ten days ago, the European Commission welcomed the blueprint developed by the strategic dialogue, a wide-ranging group that has been working through 2024 to deliver an outline of how food production should evolve.

It envisages food production trending towards plant-based food rather than meat and dairy production, with extensive, lower-input production to be encouraged.

Supports should be targeted toward those farmers with lower incomes, such as smaller farmers, farmers working land in areas of natural constraint and younger farmers.

While these are very broad strokes, there are reasons for Irish farmers to be concerned.

The biggest concern may be that COPA and COGECA - which respectively represent European farmers and co-ops - gave a qualified welcome to the report, which gives momentum to the Commission to move in the direction it wants to.

Clear signs

And all this is being done in the name of a political response to the farmer protests from earlier this year.

There are clear signs that the EU wants farmers to move ahead of consumer demand in terms of what they produce.

A succession of reports (many commissioned by the Commission) have predicted that EU meat production will fall over the rest of the decade, as will consumption.

They also predict that supply will fall faster than demand, which means European consumers will be buying and eating more meat than has been imported into the EU.

Most such reports also cite the EU’s policy of deintensification of agriculture as one of the drivers of the drop in production.

If farmers switch to production of vegetables and crops for plant-based products in significant numbers, there is a danger that carrot mountains and oat-drink lakes will be created, while the European shopper chooses Brazilian beef for their dinner. Who is this actually helping?

What is a small farmer?

The crucial issue may be what constitutes a small farmer. Most people in this country think of anyone farming much less than the 35ha average farm to be on the small side. That is not the picture across the EU.

According to the Commission itself, there were 9.3 million farms across the 27 member states in 2020. Of these, two-thirds were less than 5ha in size. That’s 12.5ac in old money.

For someone who finds that hard to envisage, the average hurling or football pitch is a bit bigger than 1ha in size. In other words, over six million farms across the EU are less than five GAA pitches in size.

In theory, larger farms should be better equipped to survive in an unsupported or less-supported environment

Unless you are producing fruit or vegetables or have poultry, pigs or a cattle finishing unit (with a suitable and sustainable export route for all the slurry, dung or litter produced), the output from such a farm won’t be able to provide an income of any significance.

So is the EU proposing to divert CAP funds away from larger-than-average farms towards these smaller farms?

In theory, larger farms should be better equipped to survive in an unsupported or less-supported environment. The problem with this thinking is that ignores two stark truths.

The first is that the margin farmers are getting for meat and for tillage crops is totally inadequate to give a viable income without subsidies.

The second is that nobody has a clue as to how farmers will be able to get a better slice of the retail price for their produce, creating viable pathways for medium-sized farms, which I would classify as 30ha to 60ha (75ac to 150ac).

Until that changes, medium-sized family farms cannot absorb the loss of supports. And these are the holdings that support full-time farming.

Diverting funds away could leave these farms with a part-time income for a full-time work requirement. That is doomed to failure.

The CAP budget has been practically static since the late 1980s. In 1990, there were 8.4 million farms across 12 member states of the EU, sharing just shy of €50bn a year in CAP funding.

Today, despite the expansion of the EU to 27 countries with a near-doubling of the farmed area, the budget has hardly grown, currently standing at €54bn per year.

When evaluating the capacity of the CAP to cope with its remit, we also have to take into account the far higher ambition of the CAP in terms of what it demands of farmers (agri-environmental schemes were barely a glint in Ray MacSharry’s eye in 1990). Then there is steady inflation, which has shrunk the value of the CAP budget in real terms.

New funding

It’s good that the strategic dialogue has recognised the need for a new, separate fund to assist farmers in meeting extremely challenging sustainability and food footprint goals.

However, these funds will simply cover the cost of actions taken - they won’t, by definition, increase the income of participants in the various schemes.

So, we come back to the same boring argument. Small farms are not viable and most of the six million very small farms under 5ha can never be viable in terms of providing a living for their owners.

But diverting funds from medium-sized farms toward smaller farms, while well intentioned, will render those farms unviable too. There’s no use taking the lifebelt off one person to give it to another. We simply need more lifebelts.