What proportion of the additional £3.3bn now on-offer from London will Northern Ireland’s (NI) new farm minister seek to secure for agriculture?
This is a question Andrew Muir MLA will find himself confronting over the coming days, as the Alliance Party representative was appointed to his new position on Saturday past (February 3).
Yes, he’s just in post and has no real experience of his brief. However, he is a politician and asking for money should be second nature to him.
As is the case within all the other sectors in NI, farming has been starved of real funding over the past number of years. And another ‘biting point’ is on the horizon.
Funding for agriculture
All of the current farmer training programmes, delivered under the aegis of the previous Rural Development Programme, conclude at the end of March.
Currently, no follow-on funding arrangements are in place.
So the question arises: will NI’s new farm minister step in and provide the cash to maintain a series of initiatives that have been universally endorsed over the past seven years?
Where production agriculture is concerned, two priorities stand out for Andrew Muir: the need to secure a sustainable farm support budget into the future and the effective tackling of the bovine tuberculosis (bTB) crisis that is now engulfing our cattle sectors.
In relative terms, the job-of-work required in getting these issues tackled should be more straightforward than would previously been the case. Back in the day, Brussels was the big paymaster: now it’s London.
The existing single payment support funding arrangements for NI remain in place until the end of the current Westminster parliamentary term. At best, this takes us up to the end of 2024. After that, everything is up for grabs.
Decisions for new farm minister
The new farm support deal must contain two meaningful elements: a realistic farm support package and the monies required to drive an effective rural development programme.
If it’s a case of simply rolling-over the current £300m single payment budget, the real term loss then confronting agriculture in NI will be more than significant.
Meanwhile, the last two years have seen stakeholders across agriculture join forces with officials from the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) to develop a new strategy to eradicate bTB. Significantly, it included measures to tackle the issue for TB in wildlife.
Last autumn, however, saw a number of welfare groups securing a judicial review outcome, which deemed the measures in the new policy relating to wildlife to be unlawful.
At the time DAERA decided not to appeal the outcome of the judicial review.
So, NI’s new farm minister has one of two fundamental decisions to make: either to appeal the judicial review outcome or introduce new bTB eradication legislation through Stormont.
But whichever option is taken, the need to fast track the job in hand is obvious.