The Irish presidency of the EU must reach agreement on about six controversial issues if it is to secure agreement on the Common Agricultural Policy reforms before the end of June, Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney told the National Dairy Council's annual conference in Dublin yesterday.

However, there was “one fly in the ointment that could scupper the whole thing”, he said, as the European Parliament still had not approved the overall EU budget, known as the Multi-Annual Financial Framework. It was agreed by heads of State in February but the parliament must also approve the budget. “If we cannot get that approval finalised in the middle of June . . . it will make it very difficult to get sign-off on Cap reform,” Mr Coveney said. The farm policy makes up about 38 per cent of the overall EU budget.

“If we don’t get this done during the Irish presidency we hand over the file to the Lithuanian presidency who do not want this file,” he said. “To be fair to the Lithuanians it is their first presidency and they have a lot to do in other portfolios without having to take on Cap reform.”

He told the conference that some of the country’s smartest young people were going into the dairy industry now. “They see it as exciting.”

Milk quotas will be abolished in 2015 and milk production volumes are expected to increase by 50 per cent by 2020. The National Dairy Council's chief executive Zoe Kavanagh said the dairy sector could create an additional 15,000 jobs in the next decade if it reached its potential. Economist Ciarán Fitzgerald said expansion in agriculture was more beneficial to the economy than expansion in other sector because most of its raw materials were in this country.

“The result is that every one job in direct manufacturing in the agri-food sector accounts for another four indirect jobs in our economy,” he said. “This is due to calculations such as the lower levels of imports needed to support those jobs and the fact that the agri-food sector sources 90 per cent of its inputs in the local economy.”

The conference also heard that one in every five children on the planet were now fed infant or toddler milk that was made in Ireland. Donal Courtney, managing director of Danone Ireland, said this State was now the source of 60 per cent of Danone's global milk supply. "The global need for nutrition is driving the demand in the both the western world as well as the emerging markets," he said.