Professor Peadar Kirby:

I am not an expert in agriculture, so I cannot answer the Deputy's question about what form of agriculture we might have by 2050 that could allow us to meet these targets. I was recently reading an account produced by social scientists in Britain about the form of agriculture that would be required to be a low carbon society by 2050. It is a very different form of agriculture. It is much more diversified and much more low scale. It is not so much geared for export as for provisioning at a local level. Those are issues for experts in agricultural production, which I am not. It just seems to me that, at the moment, we are going in the wrong direction in the way we are planning our agriculture.