Mr. Joe Healy:

There were a few questions asked. I will answer the one on the green, low-carbon, agri-environment scheme, GLAS, and Tom Short and Thomas Ryan might take the ones on emissions and the beet aspect.

I will deal with the two questions on the GLAS payments. A value for money review was done on the reason the scheme is so popular. It is oversubscribed. Many more farmers have come into the scheme. On the previous occasion, as soon as it was opened it was again oversubscribed. There are two issues in this regard. It is a rural development scheme. There is money out of it for farmers to do the right thing, and it covers their costs.

Regarding carbon sequestration, over the five years of GLAS the target will be 90,000 ha of crop cover delivering 50,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide savings per year.

Minimum tillage is being used across 30,000 ha with the potential to sequester 10,000 tonnes of carbon per year, and 1.4 million m of new hedgerows has the potential to sequester 5,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

To respond to Deputy Lowry's point on value, first, it helps to maintain that money in rural areas. It is a long way short of the rural environment protection, REP, scheme what was in place in terms of the money accruing from it, but it helps to maintain rural areas. It is probably difficult enough to quantify the value in it but it helps to maintain schools and businesses. Agriculture has a turnover of €26 billion per year but €24 billion of that is retained within the economy and three quarters of all inputs into agriculture are sourced locally. That highlights the importance of agriculture in rural areas to keep businesses and rural areas alive. We can talk about willow and there is a place for it but we must remember that willow will not keep schools open in rural areas. A willow branch will not play full back on the Ballyragget hurling team. It will not keep teams alive. There is a follow-on.

With the work farmers do through GLAS there is such a huge knock-on effect that is very often missed in terms of tourism in the most vulnerable rural areas. The committee members did not need me to come into this room this evening to tell them that either. That is the value to it. When we talk about production, and I mentioned it in my presentation, what frustrates farmers is the fact that we are four times more efficient from a carbon point of view at beef production than the likes of Brazil. In Brazil 80 kg of CO2 is produced to produce a kilo of beef. Across Europe the average is 19 kg, yet the Commissioner for Trade, Commissioner Malmström, as recently as today said she is very anxious to do a trade deal with Brazil that will allow Brazil access to export a lot more beef into Europe. On the one hand we have politicians in Europe telling us to do what we should do to improve the environment, which we want to do, yet they are willing to do a trade deal with countries that are not nearly as efficient as us. Projections indicate that the world population will grow by 2 billion to 9 billion over the next 25 years. All those people will have to be fed. If the food is not produced in Ireland or Europe, it will be produced in countries that are not nearly as carbon efficient as we are. We are the most carbon efficient producers of dairy product in Europe and we are in the top five most carbon efficient producers of beef in Europe.