Mr. Joe Condon:

I have a couple of comments on the organics. Reducing the age of slaughter and reducing the age of calving to 36 months, as has been proposed recently, would be completely against the principles of organics. That is not just my opinion. If you go through Articles 4 and 6 of the organics regulation, they refer to using animals with a high degree of genetic diversity, disease resistance and longevity. All of those proposals are completely against longevity. I believe there is an opportunity to make organic attractive to farmers with commonage. There are advances in precision farming technology and they have the ability to demonstrate that organic animals can be kept separate from non-organic animals in a commonage situation. This does not mean that the commonage is organic and it does not require that the organic be paid on, but it would make the enclosed land much more attractive for those farmers to join organics. I do not know if there is a possibility of the Department being willing to look at some type of trial or a test run on that. The other thing I would like to comment on is GEAC 2 and there were some contributions made earlier on to the effect that GEAC 2 is linked to rewetting. I would like the record to be clear that there is no requirement for rewetting under what the Department submitted to Europe in its CAP strategic plan. Basically, it is looking for examples of appropriate minimum standards that may include a ban on ploughing or minimum till or no till. There is no requirement for rewetting. I would like that to be corrected on the record. If you are talking about food security, rewetting is going to be one of the big elements that will lead to a massive reduction in production in those areas.

There is discussion of 187,000 ha of land for anaerobic digestion and close to 700,000 ha for rewetting. A significant amount of land will be taken out of production, with forestry on top of that. We will be here soon to address the food security issue, as far as I am concerned, if some of these ideas go through. On 21 November, the Minister will meet the Council of Ministers about the nature restoration laws. I believe maintaining our hill lands and all other areas as agricultural areas, based on the vegetation on that land and agricultural activity, is vital if we are to protect food security in this country.