Mr. Ruairí de Búrca:

I will pick up from where Mr. Burgess left off. I will go back to the Chair's question on agribusiness. His point was very well made. There is a resonance between the transformation in Irish agriculture and agribusiness over the past 50 years and the journey which many of our key partner countries in Africa have yet to travel. They are trying to move up the value chain from smallholdings, and often subsistence, which requires a lot of work to get scale. In some instances, we have tried to introduce key opinion makers to the concept of the co-op, which was one of the ways in which we took the smallholder model here and enabled scale and, very importantly, local ownership to be maintained. There is an attractiveness around this model. There has been a series of visits to some of the Irish agribusiness companies. For reasons of climate, the areas where we are strongest, which are often in dairy, do not always translate to an African context. This is good for Irish business because we are not in competition, but it means we must be careful to ensure when we do this type of twinning that we try to match what we can give to what the partnerships need.

Approximately three years ago, we launched a small innovation fund to encourage Irish businesses to look at opportunities with African partners in Africa. An example is a nutrition company called Devenish, which used the fund to get a footprint in Uganda and worked with Ugandan producers to improve the nutrition and some of the seed technology available and bring them up the value chain. This has proved quite successful, such that Devenish is trying to replicate it, without Irish Aid assistance, in Kenya.

On the technology point, an interesting piece of Irish technology tells when a cow is about to go into labour. This means that the farmer knows he or she needs to get the vet, or whatever needs to be done. I am not an agricultural expert.