Mr. Paul Price:

In terms of carbon leakage, if we want to make the claim that we are acting on climate and other people are not and therefore, we will leak greenhouse gas emissions to those countries, the first prerequisite for that argument is that we are actually meeting our own targets. The targets are absolute. They are not efficiency or intensity targets. Absolute emissions in agriculture have gone up and, most importantly, aggregate methane emissions have gone up.

Emitting more methane is seriously bad for climate. What one must do is decrease methane emissions in every sector. This is not just about agriculture. In every sector in every country, methane emissions and all other emissions had better go down, especially CO₂from fossil fuels, Definitely, methane emissions from any source had better go down. If we are making any argument for carbon leakage, we have to be meeting our climate targets. In pro rataterms, we have done the opposite.

What I was pointing out was that until 2011, Ireland was doing very well. Teagasc reports at the time and Government and departmental reporting were good. We were on track. One of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine's leads, looking back from 2020 on the Teagasc signpost videos, recently said that there was genuine sustainable intensification but we completely threw that out the window.

In 2011, policy was reversed. We had Food Harvest 2020 which was completely incoherent with climate targets. Although it was said that it might only increase emissions by 7%, one of the stated ambitions was that if we did lots of work, such as with the Teagasc MAC curve, at the time, we could keep emissions stable. Even that was not enough. We were supposed to reduce emissions towards the 2020 targets. If one wants to make a carbon leakage claim, one has to at least say we are reducing emissions and then we can start talking about carbon leakage.

One also has to think about what kinds of food production have high greenhouse gas emissions. I am afraid ruminant production from grass has very high greenhouse gas emissions intensity, in terms of the amount of protein produced in output, compared to other forms of production. Denmark has far lower emissions, even though it has an animal-based system, than Ireland. Its system is far more efficient than Ireland's system.

Unfortunately, in a way we have been fooling ourselves. We should think that absolute emissions must go down. If they are not going down, we should be seriously worried. They have not been going down. Methane emissions are up by 17%, and overall by 12% on a CO₂basis, since 2010-11. That is not good. In global terms, the IPCC modelling looks at reducing emissions very quickly compared to 2010. We have gone up since 2010. We cannot make any carbon leakage argument if we cannot stand on our laurels, and our laurels are not there yet. That is poor.

In terms of food security, we are looking at a global food crisis. We need people to be fed, especially the poorest people around the world. They will not be fed, I am afraid, on milk and beef. They need grain and legumes. That is the kind of balanced diet to get people through what is coming over the next year. This is very troubling.

In terms of the natural response by farmers to this situation, fertiliser prices are going up. Farmers respond to that situation like a business looking at the optimal economic return. The optimal return goes down in this situation and they will grow less grain. That is what will happen because of their response. We should support tillage and arable farming and support that production. At the same time, if we care about global food security and really want to support it, we would be very wise to lower limits on animal-derived food production in order to direct our food production and that of the world - and encourage the same thing to happen in Europe - towards producing food at the maximum amount of nourishment per hectare with the lowest emissions too.