Politicians, along with corporate retailers, have together fostered “a fantasy” at consumer level about the “astronomical” costs of a transition to low-emissions environmentally sustainable farming, the President of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) has said.
“Getting the food of the mandated standard to the fridge of your local supermarket has a cost – economically and environmentally – and that cost has to be paid,” Denis Drennan told the Irish Independent.
He added: “We had a decade or more when consumers were allowed to believe in the fantasy that all the change and astronomical expense involved in transitioning to low emissions farming and primary food production was going to happen from the supermarket fridge backwards to the farm without any change or cost to the consumer.”
The organisation has urged politicians to be honest with the public about the realities of food pricing, in the context of inflated farming expenses, due to factors including EU regulations and production costs. It comes as the Dáil debated a motion this week, put forward by the Social Democrats, which accused supermarkets of “price gouging” and treating the Irish consumer as a “cash cow.”
The House heard that food inflation has now reached double the rate of general inflation, amid a surge in the price of butter, milk and beef, with a 50 per cent rise in cattle prices.
The Dáil heard that grocery prices are now “out of control,” with families paying €3,000 annually on food bills. Supermarkets have since denied the accusations, saying that their prices are competitive and their margins are low – with Retail Ireland, which represents supermarkets, rejecting the accusations, and stating that the “high level of competition in the Irish market continues to deliver strong value for consumers.”
Speaking on Midlands 103 FM earlier this month, Mr Drennan said that farmers can no longer absorb these costs. Earlier this year, Mr Drennan said that there were problems associated with increasing farmer margin and incomes while lowering the regulatory burden and costs. Mr Drennan said it was easy to find out farmers’ costs and revenues, but that the rest of the food supply chain are not forced to divulge their own margins.
“Everyone can go on […] and discover how much it costs the farmer to produce a kilo of beef or a litre of milk, but I suppose that once it leaves the farm gate, there’s a mystery as to what the processor or the distributor or the retailer’s margins are like. That’s certainly something that we would welcome – if the regulator was given more powers to compel the other players in the food chain to explain what their margins are,” he told the programme at the beginning of July.
Mr Drennan previously said that environmental sustainability had been elevated over all else.
“It’s been obvious for a very long time now that the CAP alone cannot deliver these objectives and EU farm policy must focus on delivering improved returns from the marketplace for farmers […] The elevation of environmental sustainability over everything else has proved unworkable and has resulted in the farmers paying everyone else’s environmental costs in the transition to lower emissions food production,” Mr Drennan said earlier this year.
Last month, Mr Drennan said that the Government had failed to “step up and support farmers,” saying in a statement:
“There are challenges ahead that will have to be faced and even leaving aside the very significant and unfair anomalies in the accountancy framework used for measuring emissions, the most obvious challenge is the ongoing failure of Government to ‘step up’ and support farmers in their efforts to carry through the changes that the Government itself is urging on the farmers. It’s this failure of the Government to support its own policies and recommendations that is hampering even more encouraging results and data.”