Sir, - Any reasonable person would be sympathetic to farmers faced with a compulsory purchase order for part of their land to facilitate the national road-building programme.
Such farmers should be awarded compensation not only for the value of land which is taken but also for the consequent disruption, if any, to their farming business. But IFA President Tom Parlon's recent claim (The Irish Times, July 2nd) that the State has no right to appropriate farmland cannot be accepted.
Further, the issue of compensation is not straightforward. This is because the current market value of land even in agricultural use bears no relationship to its intrinsic value but rather reflects the very significant public transfers to landowners. The significant price supports provided to dairy, cattle and sheep farmers underpin current land values.
In addition, payments to which farmers are entitled, such as the special beef premium, the suckler cow premium, the ewe premium, extensification payments, arable aids, less favoured area payments, agri-environment scheme payments and forestry premiums, are all tied to land ownership and all have the effect of artificially raising the price of land.
Payments from the rest of society to farmers, which now account for virtually all of the income arising from farming activity, are behind the recent astronomical rise in agricultural land values. The average price per hectare of farmland more than doubled from around £4,800 in 1996 to £9,800 in 2000.
Land values are at this level only because of public transfers, and it is surely ironic that the public must then pay landowners these inflated values when the land is sought for the common good. This relationship between land values and public transfers should be borne in mind when assessing claims regarding the adequacy of current compensation values. - Yours, etc.,
Alan Matthews, Jean Monnet Professor of European Agricultural Policy, Department of Economics, Trinity College, Dublin 2.