Agriculture group warns against surrendering decision-making power

Giving up control over agricultural policy could undermine Iceland’s food security and make long-term investment difficult, Sigurbjörg Ottesen, chair of the cattle farmers’ division of the Farmers’ Association of Iceland, told mbl.is.

Sigurbjörg also chaired a committee that prepared a 130-page report on the effects of European Union membership on Icelandic agriculture. She said the report’s main conclusion was the importance of retaining decision-making power.

“Market protection, or tariff protection, is most valuable to us. Food production is a national security issue. We produce high-quality products, and this is not only a matter of farmers’ interests but of the entire nation,” she said.

Sigurbjörg said Icelandic agriculture could not be built on exemptions from EU rules that are reviewed every five to seven years. She acknowledged that exemptions might be available for northern agriculture, as in Finland, but said such areas generally covered only parts of a country where production was lowest.

If Iceland joined the EU, she said, any exemption for Icelandic agriculture would have to be written into the membership agreement. The industry could not depend on a temporary exemption subject to review every five to seven years.

“There is a world of difference between running an industry on temporary exemptions and having full decision-making power over the industry’s position,” she said.

In cattle farming, the production cycle takes years. From the time a cow is inseminated until a female calf is born and can begin producing milk, nearly three years can pass if everything goes well.

“We cannot take out loans for new cowsheds if we cannot see further ahead than seven years. We need to see much further into the future. This concerns many things, such as attracting new people and developing the industry,” Sigurbjörg said.

She said an industry dependent on exemptions had no greater guarantee than the assurance that politicians would continue granting them. “We cannot have everything depend on what politicians abroad say and do,” she said.

Sigurbjörg added that cattle farming faced a substantial need for investment. Although many new cowsheds had been built recently, she said Iceland still had operating facilities where cows were kept tied in stalls, and such systems could eventually be banned.

She also recalled that when Iceland last applied for EU membership, the Farmers’ Association approved seven safeguards as conditions for its position on membership. The safeguards were developed through an extensive internal process between 2009 and 2011, and the then agriculture minister presented them to the government and told the association that he supported them.

Sigurbjörg said it was important to establish whether the current agriculture minister had made a new decision on the safeguards, particularly as the government had stressed that the August vote concerned continuing the earlier membership negotiations.

She said the safeguards remained relevant to her own farm. Iceland had experienced serious consequences from importing animals, including an outbreak of scrapie, and it had taken decades to address the problem. She also said the Icelandic horse must not be forgotten, describing it as Icelandic agriculture’s largest export industry.