Mr. Pat Cleary:

I will deal with Deputy Kenny's question about the area of tillage at the moment versus what happened historically. Mr. Carter or Mr. Miller will address the issue of acre of barley and what it produces. I will deal with Deputy Cahill's question about GM and energy and then switch back.

As we said in our presentation, there were one million plus hectares of arable land in the country in pre-war times. Why has it declined? It has done so for many reasons, some of which were policy driven at national level while others related to farmers and EU policy on subsidisation of certain sectors in the broader agri structure. We have somewhere in the region of 360,000 hectares. If one incentivises any section, it will develop. I will give the committee a very simple example. There is a protein payment for beans or peas. In the past three years, the area of beans has gone from less than 2,000 hectares up to something in the region of 15,000. It is a very good break crop. Deputy Cahill mentioned the loss of the sugar beet industry. Why did this happen? We could beat ourselves up over the reasons. Ironically, the EU abolished sugar quota restrictions this week in the very same way as dairy quota was abolished after the cap two and a half years' ago. There was a big promotion regarding expanding the dairy sector at national level but nobody helped us to get sugar beet back and I know this because I am involved in beet arable. People were not interested. I know we came in here to committee meetings, etc. It will come back with the right mindset. Arable farmers are very resilient people. The decline in the acreage of arable farming since 2005 is significant and that was one of the reasons. I will not delay too long on it.

In respect of GM and AD, we have huge potential on farm for biodiversity, including AD, and we can use the crops we grow in AD like maize, sugar beet and food waste. However, the problem is that if I try to get planning permission for a small GM facility on my farm, we are talking about four or five years in the planning structure. A friend of mine across the Border in Fermanagh to whom I sell straw has an AD plan. It took him eight months from start to finish in the planning process and his total costs were somewhere between £8,000 and £9,000. They have a very specific rural planning policy. There is nobody saying that Northern Ireland is less rigorous in its environmental enforcement. The same rules apply.

We must make a decision in this country regarding GM. We are talking about the expansion of dairy and beef farming. That is fine. They need to be fed but if we look at what is happening in the US, we can see that up to 30% of the shelves in most of the supermarkets are non-GM and the turnover of product on that segment if four times what is in the GM segment. We must ask ourselves whether we are going to go down that route. We do not know what is going to happen post-Brexit in the context of products coming in from the UK. Everybody has to make a decision as to whether we are going to go down that route. We are talking about labelling and branding Ireland so are we going to be fully traceable from the crop or animal? How are we going to label this? We have a great opportunity in the future but we must make a conscious decision. Certainly, we see our sector having huge potential in that.