Ms Cliona Sharkey:

I thank the Deputy for the question. Unfortunately, I could stay here all day and talk to her about what is happening in the countries where we work. Climate change came onto our agenda about 15 years ago and it came very much from the ground up and through the partners we were working with. People were struggling to produce sufficient food because of the increasingly unpredictable nature of the rain on which they were depending, and that has spiralled over the past decade. Significant drought, for example, in southern and eastern Africa now occurs once every two years rather than once every five or eight years. We are shifting from long-term development to a cyclical humanitarian response. As an agency that provides a humanitarian response but seeks to enable people to move out of the poverty trap, this is a deep concern and this is why we are so engaged on this issue.

To give a sense of what it is like for people on the ground, members will have seen in recent years the news of significant droughts hitting the headlines such as in east Africa but by that time families have been struggling for months if not years with the impact. They have been doing everything they can to try to cope, including selling off their assets, including farm tools, animals and so on - the equivalent of their savings. They have taken their children out of school to send them to work. They have cut down on the number of meals per day. People have migrated, often the men, leaving the women and children to try to manage the home while they go to earn income, which is resulting in family breakdown. When we see the media headlines, the human impacts have been rolling on for months and years ahead of that.

What we are seeing is that each time these incidents happen, it becomes harder and harder for people to bounce back and there is a downward spiral of poverty and vulnerability. That is why we are so engaged in this issue, given we can see how precarious everything is on the ground. We simply cannot fathom a situation where we fail to deliver on the Paris Agreement. We know what that means but we cannot allow ourselves to imagine what it would mean for the people we work with.

Migration is an incredibly complex issue and there is a variety of push and pull factors. Certainly, we are seeing increasing conflict in some countries we work in, whether local or regional, because of natural resource scarcity and tensions. Natural resource issues were part of the Syrian conflict, so it is definitely in there among the issues. We also see seasonal and other periodic migration at a local level due to each of these impacts.

I thank Senator Lombard for his question on global food security, which is an issue we are concerned with. An important angle we hope to bring to that part of the discussion is that it is not just a question of increasing food production to meet the demands of an increasing population. We know that we currently produce enough food to feed the population on the planet yet, in the past few years, almost 800 million people did not have access to enough food. We know the increases in population will primarily be in the low income countries. The important point is that while increasing production will not solve global hunger, increasing emissions will certainly exacerbate it. We are conscious this is a complicated issue but, as I mentioned earlier, agricultural and forestry land use will have to be transformed not just in Ireland but globally. It is something we are looking at in the countries where we work. We will all have to change how we produce, consume and distribute food if we are to feed ourselves in the future.

I am not sure whether anyone else touched on genetic modification, GM. I do not have an analysis of it in respect of Ireland specifically, but it is an issue that arises frequently in a number of the countries where we work. For the people with whom we work, who are, as members can imagine, small farmers, GM results in challenges. Because these are patented seeds, it can affect their ability to save seeds, which is a core part of how they manage from year to year, but it can also require external inputs which are not affordable to them on an ongoing basis, and in some cases it can also undermine the fertility and resilience of the soil and the other natural resources on which they rely. We therefore focus more on diversified farming and rural incomes writ large to support diversity and resilience, working with local circumstances and the agroecological conditions.