Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I listened to Professor John Sweeney on that issue at a meeting we had with the farmers' organisations, including Macra na Feirme. It was very useful. Mr. Healy will remember that when Professor Sweeney was asked the question, he said every country, no matter how efficient,had to face up to the scale of the change required and the challenges posed in that regard.

Countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Australia will burn in a climate change world. It is as if we are just living in a world as it is, and it is a case of us being more efficient than someone else. Everyone will have to be engaged and everyone will have to reduce. To be perfectly honest, as an environmentalist I do not buy the idea that we can expand because we are more efficient.

I am a great fan of anaerobic digestion, but I am nervous about what I see in Food Wise 2025, namely, a significant increase in poultry and pork production. That was mentioned by the witnesses. In Northern Ireland there has been an incredible boom in pig numbers. They now have enough pigs to provide sewage equivalent to that from 12 million people. That is the level of industrial output that is planned in that sector. The anaerobic digestion systems come from America where there is an indentured agricultural system with the poor farmer who has a pig lot being on a minimal margin and often in a very precarious position. If there is an outbreak of flu or anything else happens, the pig farmers are the ones who get hit. Even though anaerobic digestion is green in the sense that one gets an energy crop, there are digestive problems and water problems. In parts of the North we are seeing the water and other systems being trashed under the guise of doing a good or green thing.

I fear that UCC, Teagasc and others are pitching this here as part of a more industrial expansionary approach to agriculture. They are putting a green label on it by saying anaerobic digestion is attached to it. I would love to see local farmers coming together on a collaborative basis, but I fear it would end up as big industry. Farmers would plough material into a big processing system that is the furthest from green. I wanted to flag that issue. We need to do research on that before we leap into an expansion of anaerobic digestion. It could be sold as a green thing but it would be an industrial farming system in the guise of a green approach from which farmers would not necessarily benefit.

We should encourage more research on carbon tax to guarantee protection for the farming community. We need to change the power relations, which is what the Common Agricultural Policy, CAP, and others are saying we need to do anyway. That might be something on which we will need to do further research.