Madam, - I refer to the column by Mary Raftery headed "Everyone's out of step but Bertie" (Opinion, October 13th). Ms Raftery suggests that some OECD figures quoted by the Taoiseach in a recent article in the Financial Times were "wildly inaccurate". In support of this, she relies on a subsequent letter to the same paper by an OECD official, Mr Stefan Tangermann.
The figures in the Taoiseach's article were correct. They were the estimates of total support to agriculture for 2000 published by the OECD. Mr Tangermann assumed, wrongly and without checking with Irish officials, that the figures related to 2003, and said incorrectly in his letter to the Financial Times that they were "not exact".
The point the Taoiseach made in the relevant paragraph of the article was that there was "broad comparability" of support to agriculture in the US and the EU15, and he illustrated this with the figures for 2000. The 2003 figures cited by Mr Tangermann were not, as Ms Raftery implies, the most recent OECD figures available. In fact, the OECD has released figures for 2004 and these latest figures show that from 2000 to 2004 support in the EU 15 grew by less than 1 per cent in absolute terms (from €112.3 billion to €113 billion) and fell as a percentage of GDP (from 1.32 per cent to 1.16 per cent). In the same period support in the US grew by almost 18 per cent in absolute terms (from $92.3 billion to $108.7 billion) and also increased slightly as a percentage of GDP, from 0.92 per cent to 0.93 per cent.
The point made by the Taoiseach is therefore strongly reinforced by the trends in support in more recent years.
It is very regrettable that Mr Tangermann's letter has caused confusion on this issue. The facts as set out in this letter have already been brought to the attention of the OECD. - Yours, etc,
NOEL TREACY TD, Minister of State for European Affairs, Dáil Éireann, Dublin 2.