Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On Bord Bia, €47 million is a substantial increase in Exchequer funding, although I do not think the Deputy was making any contrary point, given that he was asking whether we had received the best value for the markets Bord Bia was targeting. That is always a challenge and I am not a marketing expert, but the team, the board and the executive are very good. I have a lot of confidence in them and they do a good job.

China, South-East Asia and the wider Asian region have been targeted in Food Wise 2025; it is not a matter of the Department determining where food should be exported. Generally, it is due to the emerging middle classes looking westwards with their dietary habits and so on, which means that there are opportunities. As I understand it, the problem with the European market for beef, for example, to which the Deputy referred, is that while there is a market for premium cuts, it is not a growing but a static market. The growing markets for beef are in Asia. As an overall percentage, they are small but growing. We recently read in the newspapers that one of our major processors had secured a new contract to supply more beef. The Asian market is interested in all cuts, not just premium cuts. One of the contracts awarded was for part of the fifth quarter. I visited a restaurant chain, the name of which I cannot remember, on the previous occasion I travelled to China. In both Japan and China they seek premium cuts and those from the fifth quarter. There is a market for these products.

In many of these matters the function of the Department is to open markets as generously as we can negotiate. I may have misled the committee when I indicated that bone-in beef was sought in China because I meant boneless beef. We are always seeking to improve the terms and conditions of access, but it takes time. It is a matter of building relationships. We have been fortunate to have good relationships with the Chinese and the Chinese ambassador in Dublin who is leaving but who has been a great asset to us in that regard. We open markets, but the industry decides what it sells to the market. However, I understand that in China the full range of products is being sold. In the context of Brexit, we have always said the United Kingdom is the best paying market and people are slow to leave it, notwithstanding all of the challenges. It is important that other doors are opened for exporters, which is how we view our function.

On veterinary certification, we already have to certify our products for third countries to which businesses export. When the United Kingdom becomes a third country, although it has indicated that it will not request veterinary certification for our products, that may change over time as there may be regulatory divergence, where its standards may change and become different from those of the European Union. Therefore, it may require certification. We have factored this into our preparations in respect of the staff who will be required, not just in the Department but also in the HSE, local authorities, abattoirs and so on. They will all have a role to play in that regard.

On young farmers and the CAP, it is a significant challenge, but we invested 2% of our budget in the young farmer aspect of the CAP on the previous occasion and it met the demand. However, if there was to be growing demand or if it was considered greater incentives were needed, we could consider increasing it, given that these matters are up for debate.

One of the areas to which the Deputy referred was environmental measures and the climate becoming more mainstream, but that does not cause us to have sleepless nights. We were on that trajectory before it was popular, with schemes we have piloted and driven such as the green low-carbon agri-environment scheme, its predecessors and the beef data and genomics programme. It is welcome that the CAP may give us more policy levers to meet our climate change obligations.

While I note the Deputy's point on forestry, the overwhelming majority of the beneficiaries of the tax incentive are farmers, which is as it should be. I reiterate that we have a hierarchy of objectives to achieve, the most critical of which is planting trees for carbon sequestration. We need all of the incentives we can have because our level of afforestation, notwithstanding the challenges in certain communities, is far too low. There are income opportunities for farmers in that regard which far exceed anything they might make on marginal land, if not from anything else, certainly more than they would make from beef production at current prices. We need to retain the incentives and have re-examined and increased them, which is right in the context of climate and carbon sequestration.

On TAMS approvals, the case the Deputy made does not resonate because we have no backlog of approvals. The Deputy referred to an application made in October 2018 for which approval had not yet been received, but it sounds as though there might have been a documentation deficit on the applicant's part. If the Deputy wishes to supply me with the details, I will have the case examined.