COMMENT: EU aid package will hardly paper over the cracks

The pressure is still on London and Westminster to come up with an effective Covid-19 aid package for local agriculture. By all accounts, the support measures put forward by Brussels the week before last will not create the genuine safety net required by the industry over the coming months.
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And let’s be clear about something right now: Covid-19 will not be a two or three-month ‘flash-in-the-pan’ challenge for the farming and food sectors. All the experts across the various commodities are now saying that the enormous hit taken by the catering sector over recent weeks has been at the heart of the downwards spiral in market prices witnessed since the lock down measures were put in place.

It’s now obvious that pubs, restaurants and cafés will be the last to come out of the deep freeze, once Westminster agrees that society, as a whole, can come back to some form of normality. So it doesn’t take an Albert Einstein to work out that international food commodity markets will be under significant pressure for many months to come.

Rumour has it that London may push ahead with some form of agri food support package, if they are presented with a coherent business case regarding the empirical need for such measures to be taken. So my very clear advice to the key policy people in the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, the Ulster Farmers’ Union, the Northern Ireland Meat Exporters’ Association and Dairy UK is this: ‘get number crunching now.’

Putting a cohesive economic argument is one thing, getting the right political decision taken is another challenge altogether. The Chancellor of Exchequer is more likely to open his ‘war chest’ if he gets the right phone call from Belfast. And the person dialling the digits at our end has to be Arlene Foster.

Both our First and Deputy First Minister have been strangely quiet over recent weeks, regarding the crisis that is now unfolding within our farming and food industries. Perhaps they thought that Brussels would have sorted out the problems on their behalf. Alas, this has proven not to be the case.