ICMSA say Ag Climatise ‘Roadmap’ premised on a delusion – “Not a mention in 30 pages of the need to pay the real price of food”

Commenting on the publication of the Ag Climatise report, the President of ICMSA said that the broad outlines of the ‘Roadmap towards Climate Neutrality’ were well advertised and farmers would have little difficulty accepting the scale of the challenges or the need for decisive measurable remedial actions.

What farmers would have problems with, said Pat McCormack, was a ‘Roadmap’ that featured page after page of likely new duties, regulations, and costs on farmer primary-producers without even once mentioning the reformation of margins in what he described as “an economically broken and environmentally destructive supply-chain to the consumers”.  Mr. McCormack said that the ‘Roadmap’ persisted with the delusion that all the necessary change to our farming and food production system could happen “from the supermarket loading-bay backwards to the farm”.  This, he said, was the fundamental mistake that ensured that this project could never have the total ‘buy-in’ that would give it a chance of success. Mr. McCormack said that ICMSA was absolutely convinced that any plan to push through the kinds of measures outlined in the Ag Climatise that did not start with a recognition of the current artificially low price of food to the consumer was both doomed to failure and inherently unfair.

“We have to get away from this myth that all the necessary change is going to happen from the supermarkets fridges backwards and that the consumers – and their artificially low prices – will remain untouched. This myth that loads all the responsibility for the transition to low emissions food production onto the farmers has just got to be exposed and challenged – everyone is going to have to pay something and I specifically mean the consumer there who has been underpaying for their food for 30 years. So, let’s start with a commitment that the consumer is going to go back to paying the Real Price of food and work backwards from that. Instead of the ‘cart-before-horse’ model that we see in Ag Climatise where the premise is that the system keeps going with under-priced food at retail level and all the costs are loaded onto the farmers who will be expected, effectively, to carry the CAN – pun intended – for everyone else; processor retailer and consumer. Ag Climatise is 30 pages long and there’s not a single mention in there of the fundamental requirement to start with that Real Price of food at retail level and work backwards from that. As far as farmers are concerned that is a disqualifying defect and it means that, literally, on the day it’s launched, its usefulness is already suspect. We can’t go forward on that basis, where there’s no recognition of the core problem and where, instead of that recognition, we just load more and more useless regulations and additional paperwork on the farmers with some handily vague commitments to support farming and energy renewables”, said Mr. McCormack.

Ends     9 December 2020

Pat McCormack, 087-7608958

President, ICMSA

Or

Cathal MacCarthy, 087-6168758

ICMSA Press Office