The Minister for Agriculture says it does not make sense to put a temporary scheme in place to replace REPS and AEOS before the new CAP programme comes into effect.
Minister Simon Coveney says the new rural development programme will be in place at the start of 2015.
Two environmental schemes, AEOS have been operating instead of REPS.
Minister Coveney spoke to The Pat Kenny Show here on Newstalk. He said the new rural development programme will be worth in the region of €400 million a year.
Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney has come under pressure from farmers to reverse the trend of heavy cuts to the agriculture budget. With €3.1 billion the suggested adjustment on the upcoming budget, farmers will be hoping Coveney can push to protect them from the worst of the financial pain after several years of particularly tough budgets.
Minister Coveney joined Pat at the National Ploughing Championships to discuss the looming budget and other agricultural issues.
In terms of cuts, Coveney said “I can’t give an exact answer until budget day. But in the last two years we’ve managed to renegotiate on the capital side from the target spend that is put to us from Finance and the actual spend that we ended up agreeing. So I suspect and hope we’ll be able to that again this year, which means there wouldn’t be a cut on the capital side”.
While capital spending is predominantly on forestry, Coveney explained “we have a TAM [Targeted Agricultural Modernisation] Scheme, which is basically a grant aid scheme for farmers to upgrade the quality of their farmyard and facilities”.
Coveney also said “we’re also trying to persuade Government that agriculture should be part of a stimulus package, where we want to get a lot of small building going on on farms around the country… we want [farmers] to be investing in the future”.
In terms of current spending, Coveney says “our target reduction this year will be €28 million, which is less than last year. In the last three years we have very proactively, some would say aggressively, reduced the cost of running the department… Farmers will often say to me ‘reduce your own costs in the Department before you hit us’. I want to reassure farmers that we are both reducing the number of people working in the Department and reducing the size of the infrastructure while maintaining the same service. We’re sweating the assets as best we can to protect farm schemes as best we can… I’m hoping to not cut existing schemes this year”.
Coveney also addressed topics such as the agrifood sector, the horse meat controversy, CAP reform and fish farm licensing. You can listen back to the interview via the player above.
