A FUND of €1.5 billion in unspent EU agricultural cash is available and could be used to help the dairy sector.
However, this can happen only if the heads of governments and their finance ministers agree, EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has said.
She urged MEPs to lobby their governments to allow this happen when she took questions, most of them from Irish MEPs, on what she was doing to help the troubled dairy sector.
The commissioner said she had used the tools of market management which were available to her to help the sector and she and her officials were monitoring the situation closely.
“There are limits to these tools . . . Any product we put into intervention will eventually have to be put on the markets again,” she said.
Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith travelled to Brussels to lobby her for more flexibility in the support systems, which include export refunds, intervention and an aids to private storage system.
All these schemes have upper limits and Mr Smith was seeking to have these amended upwards to help the sector in Ireland. He said the commissioner was left in no doubt about the seriousness of the situation in Ireland.
“We need a twin-track approach, one that involves swiftly moving large volumes of product into international markets and, at the same time, removing product temporarily from the internal market until such time as there is a recovery across the board,” he said after the meeting.
In the parliament, the commissioner had been told by Marion Harkin MEP that milk in Ireland was being produced at below cost and Seán Ó Neachtain (FF), said many farmers in the sector would be unable to continue at the present costings.
She said there was €1.5 billion available in unspent funds, but it was up to member states to agree how this should be spent at heads of government level and the finance ministers.