Mr. Colm Hayes:

In response to Senator Daly's question about the number of participants and the dropouts from the scheme, to give an indication, last year the farmers who were in the organic scheme under the rural development programme, RDP, were all coming to the end of their contracts but because there was not a new CAP, we extended their contracts by a year. We made an offer to 1,467 participants to extend their contracts by a year, the same as we did with GLAS and all the other schemes. Of the 1,467, 1,394 accepted the extension and 73 decided not to do so. The members will see, based on those figures, that the number declining is low enough. Anyone who leaves the scheme is disappointing to us because we have invested in their conversion and their maintenance but the 73 who decided not to extend did so for their own reasons. Anecdotally, we understand there can be a variety of reasons. It can be because they were leasing land which was being farmed organically and which they were no longer able to lease because the landowner took it back or because they were retiring from farming. We do provide in certain circumstances for the person taking over from that person or if he or she is taking back the land, for example, to extend the contract, but farmers do not extend land leases for their own reasons. You will always get a bit of that. We were quite heartened by the acceptance rate of north of 95%. Had the number of dropouts been higher, we would have been concerned. I am not sure it is the issue, anecdotally, but I accept Senator Daly's point. If there is evidence that people are considering withdrawing for whatever reason, we would like to be aware of that and see whether it is something we could engage on.

The question about the organic action plan and whether it is fit for purpose is an important one. It is important to take stock of any action plan as you go through it and see whether it is still relevant. The current organic action plan is really a subsectoral plan from the overall Food Wise 2025 plan. As we all know, considerable work is ongoing on the development of a new Food Wise 2025 to bring the plan up to 2030, so it is time to take stock of where we are on the organic action plan. As I said, the implementation group assembled all the various stakeholders about two months ago, took stock of where we are on all this and reviewed all the targets to see where we are measured against them. That was a very useful exercise. It was a public exercise in that we published the outcome and we will share it with the committee after this meeting.

I agree with the comment Mr. Padraig Brennan from Bord Bia made, that it is not the time to throw out the existing strategy. It is time to look at it, to see what is working and to see where we need to pick up the pace on some actions which are probably being under-implemented. There is a variety of lead roles within the action plan across all the agencies and private bodies. It is time to see whether everybody is doing their part. Our implementation group does that as it goes along. I would suggest that even if we started in the morning on the development of a new action plan for the sector, it would very likely include a lot of the same actions as are in the current plan, albeit perhaps with different wordings. As the Senator said, we are all on the same page here on the need for everything from support for the primary producer right through to the processor and all the educational and advisory pieces that go into this. They are all in the current strategy. It probably needs to be reviewed for us to see how relevant all the actions are in light of the updated targets, because we have updated targets which were not in the development of the strategy originally. I suggest to the Deputy that it is time to take stock, rather than to start again but it is a discussion to be had for sure.