Are farmers entitled to change?

Anyone remember the year 2000? We had come through the Y2K “millennium bug” unscathed. Kilkenny won their first All-Ireland under Brian Cody, Bertie Ahern was Taoiseach, while David Trimble and Seamus Mallon had just taken the reins in the first Northern Ireland Executive.

And in 2000, farmers, without knowing it, were establishing entitlements that have lasted to this day. For that was the first of the reference years used to establish the volume and value of entitlements. It was well into 2002 before Franz Fischler, the then Commissioner for Agriculture, proposed decoupling support payments, creating entitlements instead.

It was described as the “freedom to farm” allowing farmers to de-intensify or change enterprise without losing direct payment supports. It was 2005 when farmers first claimed payment in this manner.

Every farmer received an entitlement for every hectare they had farmed through the reference years of 2000, 2001 and 2002, with the value of those entitlements the average of the payments drawn down through the reference years from the coupled payments such as the suckler cow and special beef premiums, the beef slaughter payment, the ewe premium and area aid for cereal and protein crops.

Since 2005, these entitlements have been diluted by convergence, front loading (CRISS) and eco-schemes. Extra entitlements were generated during the Ciolos reforms for farmers with more land than entitlements, although this further diluted the value of payments, those farmers received no extra money. But they still form the bedrock of the payments system.

And now they are way past their sell-by date. Most especially because a decision was made at the start to allow entitlements to be traded. They could be sold or leased with land, or rented out without land. And while you’ll hear the term “use it or lose it” a lot, it has been possible to lease entitlements with land over and over again. This has led to many farmers paying over the counter for land and entitlements year after year.

And where tillage farming is concerned, it has led to under-the-counter arrangements for most of the last 20 years too. There has been a crackdown on that in the current CAP, but not before thousands of euro an acre was levied by landowners through the years.

Not over yet

It hasn’t been a complete closed shop – a farmer setting up can apply to the national reserve to gain entitlements. But the system has been weighted far too heavily in favour of people holding entitlements. Is it time it was all scrapped?

Owning land is not farming, and the “freedom to farm” became, for some, a license to print money. For those needing to rent land to actually farm it, entitlements became a land tax, with as much as half the value being handed over in an annual tithe to the landowner.

Should the post-2028 payments system involve entitlements at all? Maybe it’s time the days of pandering to entitled entitlement owners and armchair farmers ended.