Ms Geraldine O'Sullivan:

I thank the Senator for his question. I suppose one of the biggest and the most pressing things at the moment and a key part of the policy is the replacement of the use of calcium ammonium nitrate, CAN, with protected urea and the impact it is going to have. The proposal is that the carbon border adjustment mechanism, CBAM, will come into effect on 1 January 2026. It is going to place a tariff on imported urea. Under the mechanism, there is no opportunity to look at anything else. It just looks at the urea, which has a carbon intensity, and does not take into account the fact that an inhibitor is used in Ireland to reduce the emissions. The mechanism just looks at the carbon intensity of urea and does not take account and has no ability to take account of the fact it is possible to add an inhibitor and significantly reduce the emissions. At a time when we see it as a key part of our climate strategy, we see a policy coming in at European level that will absolutely increase the cost for farmers to use protected urea, which is going to be a massive disincentive.

It is these kinds of policies that drive farmers mad. We are trying to encourage the use of protected urea and there has been a massive uptake. Now, when farmers go to the market next year, they are going to see a higher cost for it compared with CAN. This is something that needs to be addressed within the Commission. The mechanism needs to have an ability to allow consideration of the use of an inhibitor to reduce carbon emissions and to account for that in the system. This is massive. As mentioned earlier by the representatives of Teagasc, we are hoping to increase the use of protected urea up to 95% of our straight fertilisers. It is a massive part of our climate strategy, and yet we have a policy coming from the European Commission that is well-intentioned and is about trying to deal with carbon leakage, but the issue is it is not allowing our use of inhibitors to be addressed within the mechanism.

We see the huge potential here, and we have mentioned it in relation to feed and slurry additives. There are a number of demonstration projects but money will be needed. A plan will be required to get these ready to go to farm level and be adopted. We are closer with the slurry additive than with the feed additives. Some demonstrations are coming next year to explore this possibility and this will require putting in costly systems to start gathering the information. We need to see a defined project and a defined plan for doing that-----