Irish dairymen trying to beat quota system

Press, 16 August 1988, Page 34

Irish dairymen trying to beat quota system

PETER HALLWRIGHT

Bv

NZPA London Ireland’s dairymen have taken to rustling paper rather than cattle in the latest game to defraud the European Community’s costly farm system.

Irish Department of Agriculture inspectors recently caught up with five dairy co-operative bosses who had avoided £622,500 in "super-levies” — the penalty they should have paid for producing several hundred thousand gallons of milk above the quota allowed to their creameries last year. The penalty for overproduction is 90p a gallon, compared with the 66p to 83p price paid to the farmer.

Over-producers are allowed to avoid the penalty only if they can find another creamery in their area which has underproduced in the same year and the over-produc-tion can thus be balanced. At the end of the year the national over-produc-tion levy — some £2.40 million in 1987 — is divided evenly among all producers. The inspectors became suspicious when they found creameries were turning out more milk products than their deliveries should have allowed them to make. The farmers’ co-opera-tives said they had diverted surplus milk to other creameries, but checks showed they had not.

Now the co-operatives in Kerry, Cork, Tipperary and Westmeath have been threatened with legal action.

Meanwhile, the milk quota system — introduced four years ago to curb huge and costly over-production — has produced even higher peaks on the E.C.’s beef mountain.

Dairy farmers slaughtered cows they no longer needed for milk production and switched to beef, the “Economist” reported. Today the Community has a beef mountain of a record 800,000 tonnes surplus — nearly three times New Zealand’s total output last year. In spite of the best efforts of the Irish cooperatives, the combined

butter and milk powder stocks have, however, declined from 2.2 million tonnes 18 months ago to less than 500,000 tonnes. But disposal sales of these products, mainly to the Soviet Union at the expense of producers like New Zealand, have cost the E.C. £2.28 billion (5NZ5.79 billion). The Common Agricultural Policy has produced other examples of silliness on a grand scale. The E.C. has spent £1.42 billion converting some of its vast wine lake into industrial alcohol. The result is a new 740 million-litre lake of unsellable alcohol, the “Economist” said. E.C. taxpayers would be paying for such errors well into the next decade.