Losing €38 per finished pig has set Irish family pig farms “on the road to extinction” while farmers on the continent are granted emergency funding by their respective governments, the Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) has told Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue.

France has been the latest EU member state to announce emergency aid for its pig sector, with €15,000 pledged to hit farmers’ accounts within 15 days, director of policy and chief economist at the IFA Tadhg Buckley told the Minister at a meeting of farmers on Thursday.

“Poland have found a fund to help their farmers, Holland have too and last night France recognised the problem and announced they were launching a rescue fund. We must be imaginative and do likewise immediately,” pig chair Roy Gallie stated.

“If left in the ring of market forces’ constant cycles, the strongest gladiators of the retail sector will win and the goose that laid the golden egg will be dead,” Gallie said.

Losing €13,500 a week

Gallie went on to say that a Teagasc adviser had verified with him that one of its efficient pig farmer clients has lost some €175,000 from October to December of last year, with the situation having only worsened since then.

“Teagasc verified with me this morning that one of their clients – an average-sized family farm of 700 sows with a good performance of 30 pigs per sow per year - lost, in the last quarter of last year, €175,000.

“This is a staggering amount of money for a quarter loss and amounts to €13,500 per week – and it is worse it is getting, not better,” he said.

French supports

Buckley said that France has announced supports, deploying €15,000 per pig farmer immediately, with the commitment given for the funding to be transferred to farmers within 15 days.

“In addition to that, they have announced €175m in structural aid, which they are putting further detail into how they are planning on deploying that in the coming weeks,” he said.

Approval

Buckley commented that it was yet unknown how the French Department of Agriculture would deploy this structural aid, saying that the mechanism would likely need approval at Commission level.

The €15,000 emergency support payment is under the standard de minimis threshold, meaning that no permissions had to be sought outside of France for the monies to be deployed, he added to his comments to the Irish Farmers Journal.

Poland and the Netherlands

According to the IFA, the Dutch government extended its COVID-19 disruption funding to pig farmers in a similar manner that funds were allocated to elements of the hospitality sector suffering from income losses in Ireland.

This fixed-cost compensation programme was brought in by the Netherlands under the state aid temporary framework – a route used also taken by Belgium to get up to €100,000 in emergency grant aid into the accounts of pig farmers coping with income losses.

Buckley also told those in attendance that Polish farmers, whose pig sector has been affected by African swine fever outbreaks, have had some €88m in funds delivered under direct grant aid to “effectively address cashflow deficits”.

These Polish grants, the attendees heard, were limited to €290,000 per farmer under EU direct support rules.