Ms Gillian Westbrook:

Certainly the Paris Agreement was very active. It is one of the main reasons that it is considering more organic farmers. Without meaning to sound derogatory to Denmark, probably one of the reasons that Denmark was seeking to clean up its act by using a great deal of organic farming was because of the issues it had with more industrialised farming methods. It is doing a great job with organics, but it was in response to a problem it had there in terms of nitrates and the water framework.

No synthetic fertilisers, the tight nutrient cycles and the lower stocking rates all improve the performance of the greenhouse gas emissions. It also depends on how one looks at it, whether one looks at the life cycle analysis or the national inventories and so forth and if one looks at it on a per hectare or a per kilogram basis. That is an ongoing argument at present. The EU is looking at all food production and what is statistically significant. In terms of the Irish use, there is 48% from enteric fermentation, 14% from manure management and 38% coming from basically manure and bagged synthetic fertilisers. With regard to synthetic fertilisers alone, it takes 108 tonnes of water, it will make 7 tonnes of CO2 and it uses 1 tonne of oil. It is probably one of the key reasons that organics is recognised for its valuable environmental contribution.

In terms of biodiversity, many biodiversity studies have been carried out, including one some years ago in Teagasc. I do not have the figure with me. I probably have everything else but I do not have that one. There has been a massive increase in biodiversity. Across the EU on average there is a 48% increase in biodiversity on organic farms compared with non-organic farms. Again, that is taking a very broad look at it. It was not as high in Ireland in the biodiversity study, but it was still significant. It was significant enough to have a major impact on the value for money report that we fed into a couple of years ago.

Ms Maher will respond on the farmers' markets.