Speaking after the TB Forum meeting held on 26th March, the deputy president of ICMSA, Eamon Carroll, has said that the association “had no intention” of asking farmers to accept very significant portions of the proposed TB measures presented at the meeting.
Mr Carroll said the fact that would ‘jump out’ from any reasonable reading of the new proposals was that the whole burden of the surging bTB crisis – financial and regulatory – was to be placed on the farmers with little or no obligations being asked of any other element to the problem.
Mr Carroll said that thousands of farmers were already suffering severe financial distress due to bTB and while some factors were within farmers’ control – very many were simply not. That fact did not seem to occur to the Department based on the proposals which seemed to involve imposing a raft of new burdens, costs and obligations on farmers, the only group actually taking the financial and psychological hit from the surge in bTB.
“Basically, the new approach seems to involve imposing a load of new rules on the farmers – and let’s be specific, dairy farmers – while allowing everyone else, including the Department itself, to carry on doing just what they have been doing. This is going to give us the same results – or lack of them – that has us where we are right now. The ‘bottom line’ of the new measures involves putting more pressure on the group already under the most pressure – the farmers – while leaving everyone else alone,” he continued.
The ICMSA deputy president noted that the association has repeatedly called on the Department of Agriculture Food and the Marine to bring forward the scientific rationale – backed with clear data referring to each measure presented today to the Forum – so that each measure can be discussed on its own merits.
He said no such data had been presented to the Forum and there was no evidence at all that any of the measures proposed by ICMSA or the other farm organisations – at the request of the Department – had been considered or incorporated into the measures put to the Forum. Mr Carroll said that there was no evidence that the measures brought forward today would deal with all the sources of infection. But they would most certainly and unfairly target farmers.
“We can only speak for our own association and our proposals were going to impact on all sources of potential TB infection – including our own members. But we put those forward because believe that the situation is urgent and requires clear actions and hard decisions. We didn’t get those hard decisions today; we got a set of proposals that would fall 90% directly on dairy farmers and nobody else. And even at that, they won’t halt and reverse the bTB crisis, so we have something that is both unfair and ineffective,” he said.
Mr Carroll said that he had specifically requested that the Department produce the scientific data behind each individual measure they had tabled, at the next TB Forum to be held, it is envisaged, within six weeks.
