Mr. Conall O'Caoimh:

The trade trap. The more producers produces the more the price goes down and, therefore, the more they have to produce to keep their income at a constant level.

I accessed the freshest data from the EUROSTAT database last week. Deputy O'Sullivan was present a few years ago when we a launched a big report that Irish Aid commissioned us to do on examining Ireland's trade with the programme countries. The EUROSTAT data show that in the 1990s in an average year we sold seven times more than we bought from the six programme countries, but in the past five years that ratio is now 43:1. The paper refers to a mature relationship with Africa. The Africa strategy refers to two-way trade and yet when we examine the trade that has happened, we have gone from a ratio of 7:1, which was bad enough, to 43:1. Ireland, for very good reasons, wants to grow its exports to Africa. If we are to do that and want to have a two-way trade relationship, we need to put in significant effort to grow the trade in the opposite direction. The new aid policy, One World, One Future, is very good but a good deal of work needs to be done now to identify how are we going to achieve that two-way trade relationship. That is something that will need to be monitored in the coming years to see how that progresses.
The paper refers to no tied aid and that is very good. A number of European countries have pretty poor practice in that respect, therefore, it is very good to see Irish Aid committing to that. However it refers to synergies and finding, where we can, synergies between the aid programme and Irish business interests. I can understand that very well and the committee will have a role in devising a mechanism for ensuring that searching for synergies does not become a criterion alongside poverty reduction. Poverty reduction must be the criterion in deciding where our aid money goes. If synergies are a by-product fair enough, but they should not be a criterion in the decision making around where aid would go.

I suggest the next steps are that we would decide on a few key objectives underneath the heading of two-way trade. What do we mean by that? What is it in a five-year or ten-year framework that we want to achieve in regard to building two-way trade? What are some of the interim steps? Let us do a data analysis and find the baseline in terms of what is happening. I have set out some headline figures but we need to examine this on a country by country basis to see in which sectors will it be most possible to make some ground, how we will find that out, and then track that progress. We should examine what other counties are doing. The Netherlands, in its enlightenment, has had an organisation, CBI, established for a good number of years and members can check its website, cbi.eu. CBI is a government agency of the Netherlands and its task is to grow the Netherlands' imports from developing countries. We collaborate actively with CBI in Kenya and in a few other countries. That agency actively seeks to promote imports from developing countries and this is to ensure that the Netherlands lives up to its rhetoric about two-way trade. DANIDA, the Danish programme, and UK Aid both have strategies for a start - they are documented strategies - and they also have budgets for the areas that can ensure that two-way trade means something. There is a policy, a strategy and a budget, which is where such trade starts to happen. We need those three components to be in place.

We need to prioritise some areas where Ireland has a particular expertise and where it will be of particular interest to developing countries. Food processing, packaging, food safety and marketing would be some of those areas.

The other slides contain background information for members of the committee. However, I might mention the final two. One contains a table showing a supply chain from one producer with whom we work and who was in Ireland recently. This is a co-op run mostly by a group of women farmers near Mount Kenya. When they process their fruit and sell it as jam rather than fresh fruit, the local rural economy earns 19 times more than the pittance it gets when they export their fresh fruit. The final slide is another Kenyan example. The woman shown on the slide taught me how to pick tea leaves. She is a shareholder in her co-operative, which is Fairtrade certified. Her tea is on sale in Marks & Spencer as a fully finished teabag from Africa which consumers here can buy. There are no middle people between her and Marks & Spencer.