Nature Restoration Law debate is ‘further alienating’ farmers

‘I DON’T know a single farmer who isn’t interested in the nature on their farms and in passing the land on in better condition to the next generation,’ said the ICSA’s Dermot Kelleher, in the aftermath of the European Parliament’s environment committee votes on the proposed EU Nature Restoration Law recently.  

‘However, the impasse we are now at is a direct consequence of top down diktat and a complete lack of engagement with the very people who are expected to implement this law. Moreover, instead of an honest engagement with the concerns of farmers who see their livelihoods under threat from the constant attack by the extreme ends of the environmental lobby, there was a dismissive, arrogant and contemptuous attitude. 

‘This must be seen against the backdrop of what farmers have had to endure over the past few years,’ he said.

 He said that, in Ireland, the climate narrative spends the vast majority of the time suggesting that agriculture is the main cause of global warming when this is patently not true in the case of Ireland, and not even remotely accurate in terms of a European or global framework.

‘After a year spent at Food Vision meetings, farmers still have no idea of what it is that the government wants them to do in terms of long-term planning or how the government proposes to fund the very real and substantial costs of climate action,’ he said, adding that farmers have taken it on themselves to deliver real innovation, like re-seeding with clover and multi-species swards, the reduction of fertiliser use and a move to protected urea and trailed shoe slurry, all of which is costing farmers money out of their own pockets.

‘The recent recruitment of large corporations like Nestle, Unilever and Coca Cola to speak out in favour of the flawed law has further
alienated farmers’

 He added that farmers want to do the right thing for their families, for food security, for the environment and for the rural communities they live in.  ‘But this constant hectoring is not the way forward.  It’s all very well demanding more trees be planted, but the forestry planting process has been a mess for years now and farm representatives have pleaded for it to be sorted, but in vain.  The new initiative by Minister Hackett to encourage one hectare plantations of native trees is a great move, but farmers cannot do it because it is bogged down in Brussels bureaucracy.’

He said the Nature Restoration Law so far has been characterised by a complete lack of engagement with farmers on how it is to be implemented and what it will mean.  

‘Farmers are willing and able to do their fair share – we have 689,000km of hedgerow in Ireland – but the EU Commission must row back from its haughty domineering approach.’ 

He said that the recent recruitment of large corporations like Nestle, Unilever and Coca Cola to speak out in favour of the flawed Nature Restoration Law has further alienated farmers from the EU Commission and the environmental lobby.