By Richard Wright

THIS IS a good weekend for those who work for the European Commission. It is the start of the long August break, when people flee Brussels and problems are set aside until the autumn.
For the farm commissioner, Phil Hogan, the dairy package delivered in mid-July, with some more detail added this week, has eased the pressure he was under to respond to the crisis. It is not, however, clear why this should be the case.
Both the package and the amount of money are too little, too late, and far short of what member states were seeking before it emerged. The term ‘underwhelming’ would be the best way to describe the dairy package.
It was a big push for Hogan to get it up to €500m. But it is still largely irrelevant when spread across farmers in 28 member states, even if some opt to top-up from national budgets.
At every level, it is a political package, designed so that the commission can be seen to be doing something.
It is based around securing a tiny reduction in EU milk production in future quarters, against the same period last year.
However, the goal is to remove just over 1m tonnes of milk production.
Set against the increase over the past year, it is hard to see this having any impact on the overall European, let alone global, dairy market.
This reflects the fact that this is a package driven by politics – and it is about Hogan kicking the ball into touch until the expected market driven improvement in dairy prices in 2017.
Of the €500m package, €150m is for a supply reduction programme. This has been based around compensation of 14c a litre, assuming the member state makes a contribution.
Crucially, when the funding is gone, the programme ends and it comes with a lot of red tape attached.
That will be hard to meet, but it is almost certain that those in first will do best, and they are likely to be people who have already cut milk production over the past year as part of an exit strategy.
On that basis, it is a reasonable bet that this will prove irrelevant and that only a minority of farmers will see any benefit. I would also bet it will have little impact on prices, which are about to improve in any event.
This is particularly the case in the UK, thanks to the weakening of sterling. That will be seen as processors come out of existing contracts with buyers and renegotiate.
The bigger challenge is what member states do with the other element of the funding.
This is the €350m over which they have control. Distributing this to individual farmers would have no impact, and in any event it has to be linked to structural reforms to make production more cost effective.
The amount coming to the UK is around £25m, which will be regionalised, so there is an opportunity to do something meaningful for the wider industry.
This might head off some of the criticism from other sectors of agriculture, unhappy that their difficulties are getting less attention than the problems of the dairy sector.
Time will tell what this delivers for Scotland, but the industry needs to come up with a good plan quickly to secure approval from Brussels in the autumn, because a lot of member states will be making similar requests.
It also emerged this week that the agricultural markets taskforce, set up to tackle the weakness of farmers along the supply chain, is to have its remit extended at least to the end of the year.
It had been hoped it would be close to final conclusions by the autumn, but it now looks as though it will be well into 2017 before the ideas it is considering move up the political agenda in Brussels.
At issue will be whether the commission will go as far as introducing legislation. The odds are against that, which makes the task force a lot less relevant than farmers would like it to be.
For farmers here, this is just one of the many things in Brussels that will be too little, too late since, by the time it happens, the UK will be well down the exit road – given that supply chain changes will take years rather than months.