Mr. Tom Crowley:

I will reinforce that. There are two separate issues. We have been working with food security in the developing world for the past 40 years. From our experience in ensuring that the poor have food security it is about their ability to produce their own food locally and to access food locally. That is the key to ensuring their food security. That is what we have learned from our experience. The key element that is undermining their food security at present is climate change. The biggest thing we can do to ensure their food security is rein in climate change and support those communities to adapt to climate change.

It is about who accesses the products we export. I have lived in Latin America and in Africa. As I have learned, when one goes to the supermarket the exported products on the shelves are available to the elites. These are very high value meat and dairy products and they are purchased by the wealthy groups in those communities. In the case of the farmers I worked with in Honduras, the key to ensuring their food security was their own ability to produce food on their own land, and climate change is undermining that.

To reinforce what Caoimhe said, it is very important to disentangle the issues of the opportunities for Irish exports from addressing chronic malnutrition in the developing world.