Union gives broad backing to productivity-linked payment

Published on Wednesday 4 November 2009 18:33

WITH Brian Pack and his team now busy shuffling through the 100 or so responses to their request for views on the future of farm support payments in Scotland, there may have been a perception that his findings would provide a long solution to the big issues in Scottish agriculture.

However, NFU Scotland chief executive James Withers yesterday spent some time pointing out the many possible scenarios in EU policies and political shenanigans that may intervene to disrupt any long-term domestic harmony.

Speaking in Perth at a Union Council meeting, Withers said the union was giving broad support to a linking of payments to productivity. That would, he said, produce a situation where the support cash was going to active farmers.

There were three priorities for Scotland, he said, the first was to link, as far as possible, payments to activity, the second was to maintain capacity and prevent any further loss in livestock numbers and the third was to see a system introduced that would be simple to implement.

Admitting their views were very much at an early stage, Withers said it should be possible to link support to an acreage payment but for the payment to be graded to the intensity of use made on the land. This could be achieved by using soil types as a base and then using a multiplier depending on optimum stocking rates.

The problem for the union was that the big reform of the CAP does not take place until 2013 and there will be a great deal of politicking and manoeuvring before then.

EU member states now split up roughly into three groups: free marketers, with the Scandinavian countries to the fore; conservatives such as France, who want the CAP to remain as it is; and new member states who want a fair share of the CAP, having come in on reduced levels of farm support.

This latter group is already pushing the idea that all the support money should be equally divided so that the subsidy in, for example, Latvia would be the same per hectare as in Greece or any other country.

The current disparity is shown by a situation where the average payment in Latvia, a relatively new EU member state is 65 per hectare, while the level in Greece is 3,700 per hectare. Such a flat-rate policy would be dangerous and damaging to Scotland. NFU Scotland president Jim McLaren said: "This is simply not a runner."

Withers also ruled out the possibility of a return to headage payments as a method of keeping the numbers of livestock on Scottish and other European farms. The political will was not there for this at present, he said, although he added that a shortage of food could bring a change in attitude on that issue.

The future is further clouded with the signing of the Lisbon Treaty, because this brings in the 750 MEPs into the process.