Irish agriculture is now facing into an uncertain period when the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is up for renewal, betwADVERTISEMENTeen now and 2013. Last week the Irish Farmers Association underscored the importance of this critical negotiating period by launching a campaign on CAP with the newly elected Irish MEPs.

The campaign's aim is to highlight the benefits of CAP to the 50 million European consumers as well as the12 million farm families. With negotiations on CAP now looming large, the stakes have never been higher for a troubled industry.

The Irish dairy industry is virtually on its knees thanks to a multitude of factors, including low prices, over supply, the disparity of prices between the farymyard and shop shelves, and the credit crunch.

Most farmers are now producing milk below cost, an increasingly untenable position. The future of 20,000 dairy farmers and 30,000 jobs in the processing sector are at stake in an industry which was worth 2.2 billion in exports last year.

Many dairy farmers now openly say they cannot continue to produce below cost for much longer. Their plight has become so desperate that it took them to Luxemburg last week to a demonstration at a EU farm ministers meeting for more support.

The situation has seen the return of intervention, more infamously known as the 'butter mountains' of the 1980s. In a slight reprieve for the sector, the EU Commission announced last week that intervention will remain open for dairy products beyond the August closure date. The Commission also indicated that it is to to investigate retailer margins from the sale of both dairy and pork products.

Meanwhile, the lucrative live export trade in weanling cattle looks set to take centre stage again. Sweden, which assumes the EU Presidency today (Wednesday) has indicated that it will prioritise tighter transport controls during their presidency. A meeting last week between the IFA and Swedish officials in Brussels is understood not to ended positively.

It amounts to a troubled outlook for our most important indigenuous industry. It is ironic and potentially situation, given the importance of agriculture and our natural strengths in the industry, patricularly when other much lauded industrial giants of the celtic tiger era have been shown to have feet of clay.

Padraig Walshe said it was a great honour for his family and the Irish Farmers Association to be elected to the position and he pledged to give his full commitment to serving the interests of all farmers in Europe.

In his acceptance address, Padraig Walshe said that a strong Common Agricultural Policy is critical to European farmers and consumers.

The further globalisation of food trade through the WTO agreements, coupled with the unregulated dominance of the retail multiples in the food supply chain, is putting the future of millions of European farm families at risk and ultimately threatening to destabilise the supply of high quality, safe food for Europe’s 500 million consumers.

He said, “Since its inception, the CAP has been of vital importance for producers and has provided consumers in the EU with food security and price stability.

At a cost approx €100 per citizen per year, the CAP supports farmers to provide EU consumers with a plentiful supply of high quality food in an environmentally and animal welfare sustainable way.

“At national level, since Ireland joined the EU in 1973, average household expenditure on food has fallen from 17% to 7% of disposable income. However, a better job must be done in communicating the benefits of the CAP to consumers.

The European Commission and we as farm leaders must work to address this serious communications gap.”

Mr Walshe said, “the threat to global food security is very real. 2007 is regarded as the first year when world food supply failed to meet demand. Between now and 2030, the world population will increase from 6.8 billion to over 8.3 billion.

In addition to the rapidly growing population, the increasingly protein-based diets of developing countries is leading to increased food demand. Given the limited resources available including land and water, energy supply and price and the effects of climate change, supply may not be sufficient to meet this demand.”

“EU food security can only be guaranteed through promoting policies that secure sustainable, high-quality food produced in Europe, for European consumers.

The further globalisation of agriculture trade that will result from any new WTO agreement will not provide the necessary safeguards to ensure stable European production, and will inevitably put millions of family farmers out of business. This will expose the European consumer to volatile world commodity markets and prices.”

Padraig Walshe said, “This free-for all policy will drive food production to the lowest cost centres, ultimately leading to standards of food production and environmental protection being abandoned and jeopardising the security of food supply.

Politicians and decision makers must take action now to protect the European model of farming, which has worked so well for European consumers.”

Mr Walshe also warned about the need to regulate the dominant retail sector, which is another serious threat to European food supplies. “The driving down of producer prices to below the cost of production is having a devastating impact on the viability of farmers and threatens thousands of jobs in the agri-food and processing sectors.

Supermarkets must be held accountable and comply with proper trading standards in their relationship with primary producers. While supermarkets are entitled to make a profit, so too are farmers and food suppliers.”

“This is not just a country-specific issue, and requires an EU-wide response. The European Commission must take action and regulate the retail multiples in order to correct the imbalance of power between retailers and suppliers to ensure a more equitable share out of the consumer spend,” he concluded.

It had to happen. With oil hitting and hovering around $100 dollars the whole world is now talking and thinking about oil. So how dependent are we on it, how much is there really left and what are we doing to adapting to a world with less oil?

It is thought that we are more efficient and less dependent on oil than we were in the bad old days of the 1970s. There are a number of problems with this thesis. Firstly, there is the fact that we are a far more globalised economy than we were back then. Since then, national economies have been deregulated and trade liberalised, so that now, many products are made up from a multitude of interconnected and intercontinental components. And plastic has, of course gone forth and multiplied.

Laptops, disposable containers, toys, toothbrushes, cameras, the list of personalised products goes on. But then, the functioning of many aspects of the economy is dependent too: medicines, food production and transport, are all either quite literally fuelled by or dependent upon oil.

Take food: Fertilizer production and transportation is heavily oil dependent. Prices are rising – Nitrogen (made by oil at present) is up 50%, Phospate (also a finite resource) is up 67% – and the consumer is starting to experience this.

With globalisation has come global sourcing of foods and agri-food inputs; we in Ireland have a very weak food producing infrastructure, once we start to consider foods other than meat and milk. Even these depend on winter feeds which are heavy oil users, both in production and transport.

According to the junior minister with responsibility in the area, Trevor Sargent, there are less than a dozen large scale vegetable producers left in Ireland at present.

Just-in-time deliveries by road mean that supermarkets have jettisoned their storage spaces and instead opted for storing food in refrigerated trucks on the roads. Food processing is ever-increasing too – both involve more oil.

So, seeing as we are so dependent on it, how much oil is left then? That depends upon how you measure it. For example, optimists suggest that there are bound to be reserves. According to the US based Cambridge Energy Research Associates:

“Those who believe a peak is imminent tend to consider only proven remaining reserves of conventional oil, which they currently estimate at about 1.2 trillion barrels…this is a pessimistic estimate because it excludes the enormous contribution likely from probable and possible resources, those yet to be found.”

Then go on: “the global inventory is some 4.8 trillion barrels, of which about 1.08 trillion barrels have been produced, leaving 3.72 trillion conventional and unconventional barrels, an order of magnitude that will allow productive capacity to continue to expand well into this century.”

Pessimists suggest that these reserves, should they be found, will be too difficult and costly to extract. They suggest that this may already be the case for reserves in deep water, the artic, extra heavy, oil shale and enhanced recovery oils. The crux of the matter is whether all the known reserves can be found, processed and delivered to market in time. Proponents of the Peak Oil theory suggest that we are already at the peak oil point, where accessible reserves will be smaller than what’s been extracted. They suggest that we need to make plans urgently to deal with energy decent, or powerdown.

So what is Ireland doing about it? Oil consumption per capita has risen 50% over the last 15 years, while our dependence on imported oil and gas stands at 85%. According to an Amarach consulting report from 2006, services and manufacturing will mostly be affected indirectly by peak oil in the short term, whereas residential and agricultural sectors are more vulnerable. They suggest that our mitigation strategies are vital.

The new Energy Minister, Eamon Ryan has begun to put some mitigating factors into place: these include funding for renewables research, the smart electricity metering programme for houses which will be rolled out in April, and improved north south energy co-operation. A National Energy Efficiency Action Plan is being finalised at present, which according to the Minister, “will allow us to save €1.7 billion or 3 million tonnes of oil every year.”

Minister Ryan states that “We are also committed to making energy efficiency savings of 20% by 2020. The public sector will have to make energy savings of 33% by this date.”

Building energy efficiency standards have also been introduced for all new houses by Environment Minister John Gormley.

Some parts of Ireland have taken matters into their own hands, most notably Kinsale and north Tipperary, in particular the town of Cloughjordan.

In Kinsale, students from the 2 year permaculture course in the local college along with their then teacher, Rob Hopkins, designed an energy decent plan, which has received some funding from the local council. The plan goes through all the key aspects of socio-economic and cultural life in Kinsale, and produces a road map for how to reduce energy use.

“We didn’t think it was going to be that big a deal, but the plan has been downloaded over 5000 times around the world” according to Klaus Harvey, who sits on the Steering Committee of Transition Towns Kinsale. This plan has become an intergal part of what has become the known as the transition towns movement. For Kinsale, food, education, housing, economy and livelihoods, health, tourism, transport, waste, energy and marine resources are all examined and mapped out in energy decent terms.

In north Tipperary, very ambitious plans are afoot. A 130 house ecovillage is being constructed at present, adjacent to the local village of Cloughjordan. According to Duncan Martin, of the ecovillage’s energy, waste and water subcommittee, “The houses will be well insulated and designed to make best use of the sun's heat”. There is an ecological charter which sets out the standard which the house must meet.

He goes on: “all our space heating and hot water will come from renewable sources. Additional heating will be provided by a district heating system. This will circulate hot water to every house from a central array of solar panels, backed up by two wood-chip boilers. The woodchip will come from local forestry wastes, so we will be independent of imported fossil fuels”.

And it’s not just the ecovillage itself. “The ecovillage is a partner in a European project called SERVE - Sustainable Energy for the Rural Village Environment. This is providing over €2 million in funding for the area around Cloughjordan to improve energy efficiency in existing houses and expand the use of renewable energy. This will cover such additions as more insulation, double glazing, solar panels, wood pellet boilers and better central heating controls”.

In total, along with the ecovillage itself, 900 houses in north Tipperary villages will benefit from the SERVE project.

Is it all enough? In the final analysis that depends upon whether we resist or embrace change.

Most of the benefit went to the dairy sector, and despite the dreadful summer the output value of grain rose by 73%.

However, difficulties were experience by farmers in the beef, sheep and pig sectors.

The good news for the farming sector resulted in higher prices for consumers.

The Minister for Agriculture, Food & Fisheries, Mary Coughlan, said she expects this year to be another positive year for farming generally, and did not foresee a 'massive' increase in food prices.

Ms Coughlan expressed relief that neither bluetongue, bird flu nor foot & mouth disease arrived on this island, but she warned that everyone would have to remain on alert against these viruses again next year.

The Minister said one of the biggest challenges this year would be the 'health check' review of the Common Agricultural Policy.