A £3 billion package for a new 15-year Rural Environment Protection Scheme under which farmers contract to farm in an environmentally sensitive manner was announced yesterday by the Minister for Agriculture.
The revised scheme, which goes to Brussels for sanction next week, will apply in natural heritage areas and commonages and will replace the existing programme, which has been running for over five years.
Already 33,000 farmers receive up to £5,000 a year from the Department for reducing stock levels, preserving natural features and using agreed limits of fertilisers and other inputs.
The new scheme, with increased levels of payments, will bring the overall value of the scheme annually to £205 million. The Department expects the number of farmers taking part to rise to 50,000 by 2000.
In the new scheme the ceiling on qualifying land has been raised from 100 to 300 acres, and this will mean farmers will be able to receive aid of up to £9,400 annually.
The payment rates under the new package are £80 per acre for the first 100, £8 per acre for the next 100, and £6 per acre for the third 100. In the existing REPS scheme, the average farm size is 80 acres in natural heritage areas, which means these farmers can expect to receive up to £6,400 annually from the revised scheme.
Other changes announced by Mr Walsh involve the abolition of the rule that a farmer had to have 10 acres of fenced land to qualify his commonage land for payment.
Farmers will now be entitled to earn up to £5,000 from the scheme before they lose their entitlement to social welfare, and it has been agreed that where anomalies exist in relation to individual farms, the natural heritage boundaries can be changed.
The Minister said there was a Government commitment in the Partnership 2000 agreement to provide full compensation for all reasonable losses to farmers arising from the proposed designations under the EU Habitats and Birds Directives.
"The new compensation rate of £80 per acre fully honours this commitment. The new arrangements, formerly confined to special areas of conservation, will now extend to all natural heritage areas, which represent a 370,000acre increase over and above what was originally agreed, bringing the total to 1.235 million acres," he said.