Ms Caoimhe de Barra:

I will invite my colleagues to speak on some of these points also. My colleague, Ciara Kirrane, will deal with the first question. As regards the challenges we face, as a development agency we often encounter the positing that there is a direct trade-off between global food security and achieving changes in climate change legislation. It is important to understand that these issues are quite separate for us.

I will give our perspective as a development agency. Global food security impacts on the poorest people in the poorest countries. Global food security is an area that we and my colleague, Tom Crowley, focus on primarily. It is about ensuring food availability locally for local populations and the generation of food supply within a region or country. We often hear an argument which we believe is over-simplified, which is about the expansion of food production in countries such as Ireland, which tends to produce high value added products that have a strong and growing market. Sometimes one hears people say, "Is this not part of a response to global food insecurity?". The simple answer is that it is not. It must first be put on the record that those two things do not have a direct link.