Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for the outline. I am not saying this as a personal criticism of him as the same thing was happening when we were in government. However, when all of this talk about output targets came in, I remember being very critical of it at the time because I always believed that the output targets would be just another layer of bureaucracy, another box-ticking exercise we would all get involved in, taking staff time without really having any benefit.

Programme A states that the target is to secure a beneficial outcome for the agriculture, food, forestry and fishing sectors in EU and international negotiations. As any person would say, first, the Minister is unlikely to try to do anything else and, second, he is very unlikely to come back and say the outcome was not beneficial. It is a pity the target was not more specific. I am sure that when Senator Mary Ann O'Brien was running her business, the targets were more specific than that. I am sure she did not just say the business should increase sales but that it should hit a specific target, as that is what the private sector would do, and if the target was not hit, that would be admitted. I believe that either this exercise should give us real and meaningful targets next year or we should just abandon it. We have no way of measuring success or failure against nebulous targets like that, and it would take us all day to find out what the specific targets were and how they were measured. I doubt the Minister succeeded in getting everything he set out to get but we do not know.

With regard to trade, the target is to continue the initiative to facilitate trade and market access for exports of food, beverages, genomics and live animals. The Minister talks about all of the different things he did in regard to incoming and outgoing trade visits and market access. Do we have any quantification as to what proportion of markets these visits represent? For example, what proportion of our sales are to the markets of Mozambique, the Philippines, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Palestine, Japan and Australia? What are the target increases we are going to achieve in these markets from all the activity? While I am of course in favour of the activity, I believe it should be much more specific. I do not expect the Minister to have all these answers today but this is very disappointing because we have all these targets yet the committee has no way to measure them.

The Minister's brief states that he will continue to implement Food Harvest 2020. He said a progress report was launched on 17 September and that 74% of the Food Harvest recommendations have either been achieved or that substantive action has been taken. Is it the case that this action was taken on the recommendations? How do we measure the recommendations or the achievement of output results against what was in Food Harvest 2020?

While I do not want to delay the meeting, I believe this exercise needs to sharpen up in terms of targets if it is to be worth having at all. If we are not going to do that, we would be better going back to the old system and just going through the figures and measuring against those figures.