More than 20,000 applications from Irish farmers for the EU Single Farm Payment (SFP), worth €1.4 billion annually, have been found to contain errors.
Letters are being sent out to the farmers involved today detailing the errors on their forms and outlining what they must do to correct the forms – or face a delay in payment.
While the form is complicated and involves a great deal of detail, the payment received is vital to keeping Irish family farms afloat, and accounts for all farm income in some cases. Average direct payments to farmers in 2009 was €17,109 per farm, according to Teagasc figures published in June.
The report said the direct payments contribution to Family Farm Income increased from 103 per in 2008 to 143 per cent in 2009, meaning € 5,141 of direct payments received, or 30 per cent, went towards covering farm costs.
The Department of Agriculture has the job of checking over 120,000 applications for the SFP, which is a catch-all payment for all previous schemes.
Confirming the fact there were more than 20,000 forms with errors, it said it has to write to the farmers involved and that the errors were typical of errors identified annually.
They ranged from instances where the application had not been signed, to dual claims where more than one applicant had declared a specific land parcel, to overclaiming for land. This last instance would involve an applicant claiming for a greater amount of land than the department’s records showed the applicant owned or leased.
Other errors included farmers not declaring whether they owned, rented or leased land which they were claiming for, and failure to submit a map of the farm where there had been a change in ownership of land.
It said some farmers had also failed to specify which crops were being grown – for example, whether they were winter or spring barley. This indicates the level of detail that is required by the department to satisfy the scheme.
The department said it was a matter of urgency that farmers replied to their letter of query, because Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith had sought an advanced date for the payment of a portion of the SFP, in view of the extreme weather last year and the credit crisis on farms.
The Minister had asked that the payment be made from October 18th next, rather than December 1st. The request was due to be formally considered and voted on in Brussels in two weeks’ time.
“In the meantime, the department is making every effort to maximise the number of applications that are cleared for payment,” said a statement last night.
The average Family Farm Income (FFI) in 2009 was € 11,968, a decline of 30 per cent on 2008, when the figure was €16,993.
Teagasc said the decline was due entirely to a drop of 14 per cent in the value of farm gross output, as total costs actually fell by 7 per cent.
Approximately 48 per cent of all farms had an income from farming of less than € 6,500. On an estimated 39 per cent of these farms, the farmer held an off-farm job.