Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said yesterday that British prime minister Tony Blair, whom he described as his "good friend and colleague", was wrong about the cost of the Common Agricultural Policy.
The Taoiseach, on his first official outing after the summer break, chose Iverk Show, Piltown, Co Kilkenny, to launch a spirited defence of the CAP and lay down a marker that he would defend it.
Officially opening the event, the Taoiseach said it was not valid to say the cost of the CAP was too high an amount in the EU budget.
"This is an argument made by my good friend and colleague, Tony Blair, and I have to say quite frankly that he is wrong," he said.
In his prepared speech, Mr Ahern said that simplistic and negative statements had been made about the CAP, many of them driven by self-interest. He wanted to set out the truth about the issue.
The original objectives of the CAP were still valid. Farm size was and still is crucial to farm profitability and, in this, Europe was at a competitive disadvantage. He said the average size of a farm in the EU 15 was only 18 hectares. The comparable figure for the US was 10 times bigger, at 178 hectares. He said Canada was at 422 hectares, Australia at 3,243 and Brazil, with 273,000 farms, had an average of 916 hectares.
The Taoiseach said in this situation, it was abundantly clear that if the EU eliminated or significantly reduced support for agriculture, then European farms on the margins of commerciality would go out of business and European agriculture would fail.
The Taoiseach said we tended to take food security too much for granted - yet only half a century ago, much of Europe was on food rations and it would be grossly irresponsible if the union, with its 450 million inhabitants, did not place food security at the heart of its agricultural policy.
Many commentators, he said, had ignored the fact that the CAP had already been reformed. In June 2003, the Council of Agricultural Ministers had agreed the most fundamental reform of the CAP since it was established.
"I hold that it is simply not credible to call for a reform of a policy the most recent reform of which is only now being implemented.
"The reforms of the CAP over the past two decades have brought CAP into line with present-day realities. The 2003 reform was the most radical in this respect also.
"It provides that decoupled payments may be reduced or eliminated if a farmer does not comply with 18 different legal instruments."
He said those who called for cost-cutting and claimed that the CAP absorbed an excessive amount of the EU budget, should put forward a rational process which would require comparisons to be made and the basis for these comparisons should be valid.
"It is not valid to claim that the cost of CAP absorbs too high a percentage of the EU budget compared with other activities. That percentage is high because agriculture is the only fully-funded EU policy and because the EU budget is so low," he said.
Mr Ahern said a more relevant comparison would be between farm supports in Europe and the US.
The OECD estimated that transfers from consumers and taxpayers amounted to $103 billion in the EU and $92 billion in the US, 1.32 per cent of GDP for the EU and 0.92 per cent for the US.
"This broad comparability of support exists despite the fact that the average farm in the US is almost 10 times larger than the average farm in the EU," he said.
He said a decision to reform the CAP again would not only breach the Council of Ministers' decision, but it would also hand our WTO negotiating partners a major strategic advantage.