This week the sixth ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) takes place in Hong Kong.  The Ministers for Agriculture and Development from a record number of 148 countries have come together to negotiate new terms of international trade with a view to opening up world markets to the developing countries.  This time there is a higher representation of developing countries and they intend to fight their corner against the E.U. and the U.S. who have tended to dominate these talks in the past.

The Irish Commission for Justice and Social Affairs issued a position paper entitled, “Promoting Fairness of Trade: The Challenge to Eliminate Poverty” in the run up to the Hong Kong Conference.  This Commission of the Irish Bishops’ Conference is comprised of five bishops and a number of eminent and very committed lay people, two religious sisters and a priest secretary.  Their position paper shows a depth of reflection and experience of poverty in developing countries.   They very naturally make the elimination of such extreme poverty their main priority.  They wish to give the poorest people in the world, 1.2 billion of whom earn only a dollar a day now, access to world markets.  They see agricultural subsidies and tariffs, generally as impacting negatively on the economies of the world’s less developed countries (LDC’s).

I agree with almost everything which this Commission has said in their statement and I thank them for the work they are doing on behalf of the Bishops’ Conference and the Irish Church.  I share their concern for the poor farmers of Africa.  I have been to Uganda and to Malawi with Bóthar and have seen, at first hand, the poverty of the small holders but also their desire to improve their lot, given the opportunity to do so. 

All I wish is to add to the views of the Commission for Justice and Social Affairs is how their proposals, if fully accepted in Hong Kong, would impact negatively on Irish farmers and on rural Ireland and indeed on rural Europe particularly if they were introduced within a short timeframe.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the target of much criticism from many quarters for years now, was set up originally to encourage food production when food was scarce in Europe.  It became of victim of its own success.  By the late 1970’s there were butter mountains and wine lakes. But the CAP has been reformed a number of times since then, most recently in 2003 AD with the introduction of decoupled support payments which are no longer linked to current production.  The Single Farm Payment means that it is no longer necessary for farmers to produce a particular product.  But there is a cross-compliance requirement that land must be kept in good agricultural condition and the environmental and animal welfare conditions must be respected.   Farmers’ production choices will, for the future, be determined by what the market wants rather than by the range of subsidies on offer.  Farmers received their first payment only very recently.

The Irish Farmers must be forgiven for looking on the future with some trepidation.  Their incomes have been falling behind since the mid-nineties when compared with other sectors.  Farmers' sons and daughters are not willing in many cases to take up farming.  They prefer to take jobs in the town or city where the hours are shorter and the pay and social life are better.  Many farmers now take up part-time jobs to supplement their incomes. While this helps, the experience tends to be that the children of part-time farmers tend not to follow in their parents’ footsteps as part-time farmers but tend rather to use farming merely as a leisure pursuit or sell off most of the land to larger land holders.

If proposals for the removal of all farm subsidies were to take effect immediately it would accelerate the flight from the land and decimate the rural population.  At present, there are officially 120,000 farmers with a further 40,000 working in the food industry. Following the “rule of thumb” that each job in the production sector supports another job in the services sector, the agri-food sector accounts for a total of 320,000 people, 16% of national employment and about 30% of employment outside cities and major urban centres. Provincial towns like Thurles rely on the rural hinterland for much of their business.  But the number of farmers is declining at the rate of 1.5% per annum.  More alarming statistics have been advanced but I would be hopeful the decline in numbers will remain at the present rate, barring sudden or drastic changes in world trade. 

Agriculture must always be seen in a broader context than food production.  It goes way beyond the economics, it makes an essential contribution not only to the economic but also to the social viability of rural communities.  Farming is the backbone of our rural communities. If farmers do not conserve the environment and tend to the landscape who will?  Therefore, agriculture should not be treated like any other sector.  It must continue to receive public support in one form or another into the future.

I do not believe that the two objectives of assisting poor farmers of the developing world and maintaining a strong farming force in vibrant rural communities in Ireland and in Europe are incompatible. It is a question of giving both time and space to find their equilibrium in the global economy.

Changes in world trade could be made gradually so that farmers in developing countries could join world markets at their own pace, allowing our farmers comparative time to adjust to the changes.  It would be a serious error to see all developing countries as a single bloc all having the same degree of poverty.  There are two very distinct groups of countries here.  There are the very impoverished countries of Africa called Less Developed Countries (LDC’s) and the much wealthier group such as Brazil and Argentine and others. China is an interesting case.  It has made massive inroads into the world textile markets to the detriment of lesser developed countries such as Lesotho in Southern Africa. Considering its record in human rights, China’s dominance of the textile market might well deserve as much scrutiny as farm subsidies.

The LDC’s should be given preferential treatment. The wealthier countries however, which can produce food much cheaper than we can without environmental, traceability or disease controls must not gain equal freedom of access to world markets.  For example, Irish farmers need a beef price of 2.60/kg (and their income is a direct payment) whereas beef can be produced in Brazil for 1.30/kg.  The Brazilian farmers are largely composed of ranchers and industrial farmers.  One would like to know whether their workers receive a fair wage.

A homely example would be the housewife putting food out for birds during frost or snow.  Placed in the open, the larger birds take all the food and leave the little birds to starve.  The birdfeeder was invented to ensure fair-trade between the birds! I believe that we would all be in agreement with the proposals to give preferential access to the least developed countries while access to the wealthier countries should be a different story.

But, it is just as important for the WTO to ensure that the benefits of free trade are distributed fairly down to the small farmers or the workers as it is to give the developing countries access to free trade. The Fairtrade movement has shown the way in this regard.  The small extra money paid by consumers for Fairtrade coffee or tea reaches the poor farmer or his co-operative at the place of origin.  Thurles has just recently been awarded Fairtrade status.  I congratulate the Town Council and the Thurles Fairtrade Committee and all the business premises and individuals who helped to bring this honour to Thurles.

If time and space are given and free trade and fair trade are introduced worldwide, farmers in both the developing countries and our own Irish and European farmers will both be enabled to make the necessary transition to their fair share of the income needed for personal, family and community development. A delicate global balancing act on the part of the WTO is called for here.

New opportunities will certainly come to farmers in the near future.  For example, rising oil prices may hasten the change to bio fuels.  Rape seed oil could be the crop of the future.  The removal of excise duty from bio fuels in the recent budget could be a sign of things to come. Biomass fuels come under the same heading.  So could a greater use of wood become a means of generating recyclable energy.  Ireland can grow trees twice as fast as in Sweden and we are under-forested. Wind energy is another environmentally friendly resource which is growing in popularity.  These are just a few examples, I leave others to the inventive powers of our rural people.  But, such initiatives will only become economically viable if they receive financial strong backing from Governments.

The sudden removal of all E.U. supports from Agriculture overnight would certainly be a disaster, not only for farmers but for rural communities generally.  But, if the process is managed carefully over a period, the transition to new methods of farming will be successful.  But it is essential that Irish farmers maintain a strong food producing capacity.  Global trade assumes a global environment free from major conflicts.  There is no guarantee that future conflicts will not leave us to rely on our own food production again at some future date.

The future of rural Ireland depends on the presence of a confident, self-reliant farming population on into the future.  Oliver Goldsmith’s warning in the “Deserted Village” is still valid –

“But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,

when once destroyed, can never be supplied”.