Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I apologise; I had to go to the Chamber for a few moments. I agree with what the Minister has said that we need a new vision for agriculture. Anyone who seeks to try to present the case that nothing should change in agriculture is doing farmers a disservice. In a decade’s time when the price of carbon goes to well over a €100 per tonne, the farming systems that did not look seriously at carbon and its management will leave family farms with much deeper problems than if they had made an early move to make those changes. My only worry is that by setting very ambitious targets in a sector like agriculture, where the pace of change is not going to be easy given the age profile and mix of farming methods, we may be trying to force change faster than the system is capable of delivering.

We need to be thinking of paying for sequestration. In international inventories, sequestration through forestry or land management of one sort or another is not counted as part of the inventory and would not count towards the 51%. We must start to think differently because we need to start paying farmers to be farmers of carbon. This inevitably means that apart from CAP funds, other funds need to be introduced which farmers can earn, taking account of the likelihood that farmers will be much more efficient, in cost terms, in bringing down our carbon footprint than some other sectors. If one can relieve sectors of more expensive burdens, there should be scope to support farmers in delivering some of the changes that are available in the agriculture and land use sector. It must be done in the context of new policy tools to allow farmers to make this transition. If we rush to set targets and do not have those sorts of mechanisms, farmers will become frustrated. What we have to do is try to get people on the one page in terms of combining the challenge to farm carbon while also delivering food.

I worry that this debate is often pitched as one group opposing another, and that is a dangerous arrangement. We must find the space where a new vision for agriculture can be carved out and where people can see a decent family farm income coming in, albeit from doing different things compared to how things had been done before. It is a challenge for the Oireachtas and our committee, in particular, to design those mechanisms.