Irish farmers can retain single farm payments based on production from 2000-2003 and should not fear the so-called "health check" on the Cap, European Farm Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said yesterday.
Ms Boel told the annual general meeting of the Irish Farmers' Association in Dublin that she was aware of concerns about changing the EU farm payment system arising from her comments that she wanted to reduce the difference between payments.
"Let me reassure you, this section of the health check is nothing to worry about. If you still want the historical model of the single farm payment scheme, you can still have the historical model.
The commissioner said there was a strong case for reducing the variations between payments to farmers because in the future the public would find it hard to understand why one farmer was paid more than another based on production decisions taken 10 years earlier.
On the crucial area of cross-compliance or adherence to the rules of farming, Ms Boel said she was not going to unpick the principles of cross-compliance. "We need cross-compliance in order to link direct payments to things that the public wants and therefore, to justify those payments," Ms Boel said.
On milk quotas, the commissioner wanted to give the sector "a soft-landing" when the system ends in 2015 and because Ireland and other states needed quotas immediately to service a growing market, she had proposed a 2 per cent increase this year.
Ms Boel indicated that she would be proposing further increases in milk production before 2015 and these would be enough to help meet market demand, but at a rate which would not undermine the market's stability.
The commissioner was questioned by a number of delegates at the meeting about the amount of money being transferred from mainstream farming into rural development, which she said was needed to meet commitments on climate change, managing water, bioenergy and biodiversity.
IFA president Pádraig Walshe had complained in his address that his members were opposed to this movement of money called "modulation" at a compulsory rate of 13 per cent.
"This simply means taking money from the Cap budget and from farmers, and spending it instead on some dubious rural projects which EU government are not prepared to fund themselves," he said.
However, the commissioner said such transfers were necessary and it was not being lost to farmers because they too wanted a healthy, vibrant rural society.