Professor Gerry Boyle:

I express our appreciation to the Chairman and the joint committee for extending the invitation to us. I have given the committee a set of slides – I gather all members have received a hard copy - to which I propose to talk. However, I will not go into detail on each and every line of them.

Under the Agriculture (Research, Training and Advice) Act 1988, Teagasc has statutory responsibility for the provision of research, education and extension services for the agrifood sector.

Traditionally Teagasc has had a somewhat sporadic involvement in development issues. Largely because there was a certain waning among international bodies in their interest in agriculture in the 1990s, we also wound down our involvement. From about 2010 onwards, with the Chairman's support when he was Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the support of his Department our involvement recommenced. Since then we have been supported by subsequent Ministers for Agriculture, Food and the Marine.

I do not need to emphasise to this committee the central importance of agriculture to many developing countries as a source of employment and livelihood, and an earner of scarce foreign exchange. Central to tackling poverty, which bedevils many of the Irish Aid countries, is the smallholder. Where does science and technology come into this picture? Clearly it is in the productivity aspect of smallholder production. We see science and technology, research and innovation as driving productivity, and productivity in the long run will drive living standards.

Food security and sustainability feature prominently on the global agenda and are now firmly embedded in the national policy agenda. Our overseas aid policy very much focuses on and prioritises the reduction in hunger as part of our adherence to the fulfilment of the sustainable development goals. There is a need to strengthen all these programmes particularly in agricultural development and associated environmental developments.

Our initial involvement with Irish Aid was simply because Irish Aid approached us and we had very productive discussions with it. It does not have the expertise in these areas that we have. That was the basis of establishing a working relationship in the context of a whole-of-Government approach to dealing with a variety of global challenges.

Irish agricultural policy is now embedded, obviously, in EU policy but also at a wider international level with a focus very much on addressing what we now call the grand challenges that we are about to face. As I emphasised earlier, we see our work in development support as being very much part of a whole-of-Government approach. To that end we signed an initial memorandum of understanding with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in February 2015 after working for a number of years with Irish Aid. Following a review, we entered into a new partnership in May 2017.

Like all State agencies and organs of the State, we do not have an unlimited budget and so our engagement needs to proceed in a sensible way, but a couple of principles underlie it. In our involvement, we adhere to our own statement of strategy, which very much emphasises the importance of global security as one of the grand challenges of our time. Our work is very much in line with Irish Aid. We work with Irish Aid. It sets out the policy agenda and we would like to think that along with our parent Department, we are supportive if its work in any way that we can.

We have been largely responsible for establishing the Irish Forum for International Agriculture Development, IFIAD. That is essentially a consortium of official bodies, Departments, agencies such as ours, and, most important, the community of NGOs involved in development aid. That provides us with a forum for exchanging ideas on policies and interventions. It allows us to explain to these NGOs in particular the kind of support we can provide to them in the context of public policy as enunciated by the Department.

In the past we would have been very much focused on delivering technical support in missions on the ground. While we still do a certain amount of that, our overriding focus on this occasion of our new engagement in this critical area has been on support for the development of public institutions that work in the field of research and development in the Irish Aid countries. We see ourselves as working to assist the development of the next generation of educators, farm extension workers, research scientists, entrepreneurs and policy makers in the countries concerned. We have a particular interest in focusing where we can on the development of long-term capacity building of universities, agricultural training colleges, vocational schools and so on, as well as government departments.

I know the Chairman is aware that Teagasc has a vast array of people with directly applicable expertise in this area. We also have a large cohort of retired staff who are very committed and interested. To their credit many of them at their own expense have got involved in various development projects. That is an extraordinary resource that we are anxious to cultivate along with Irish Aid.

We have a very successful postgraduate programme, known as the Walsh fellowships. I know the Chairman is aware of that from his time as Minister. Teagasc has the single largest cohort in Ireland of PhD students dealing with the agrifood sector. We have 240 students at the moment. We have commenced extending that scheme to students from developing countries in partnership with the countries concerned.

I will now outline the countries in which we are involved so far - these are very much initial steps incorporating relatively small-scale projects on which we hope to build. We have an involvement in Mozambique on dairy and beef development. In Kenya we have looked at developing the capacity of the research and development system, and we have been involved in potato breeding. We are doing the same in Ethiopia. It is ironic given our own history that we have been very much involved in seed potato development. We are also advising on expanding the research and extension capability.

We have had a recent involvement in Vietnam in supporting it in developing its capability in the agrifood sector though economic modelling. It might not be well known that we have a very small involvement in Eritrea largely through the Vita NGO and latterly through Gorta self-help. There we have been looking at dairy and seed potato development as well as capacity.

We are about to make a scoping visit to Colombia on foot of the suggestion made by the President to see whether we could provide technical assistance in the huge redevelopment transformation that is taking place there.

I will outline some of the outcomes so far. I draw the committee's attention to the establishment of the Irish Forum for International Agricultural Development which is a very important body because it represents the NGOs and official bodies involved in the development process. In the agriculture sector we are increasingly being seen as a favoured partner for Irish NGOs. We have developed a very strong relationship with Irish Aid which we see as driving the agenda. We come in behind it to support it. One of the outcomes is that we now regularly host visiting delegations from Irish Aid partner countries at our various sites throughout the country, depending on the interests of the delegation. We have also established formal relationships with our counterparts in many of Irish Aid's partner countries and in one very prominent non-partner country. Through our contacts, we have also developed excellent relationships with the so-called CG research infrastructure which Irish Aid now financially supports to a significant extent. We are involved with it in its research programmes. One of the lessons we have learned so far is that in many developing countries there is huge interest in the model we have developed in Ireland for the integration of research with extension and education. While we are still challenged in that respect in this country, this is very interesting. One of the characteristics I have noticed in virtually all of Irish Aid's partner countries I have visited is the severe disconnect between the research arm and the extension and education arm. Unfortunately, a lot of knowledge that could be used to benefit the smallholder is not transmitted very effectively for a load of cultural and sometimes financial reasons. The financial reasons are relatively easy to address. The cultural reasons are more difficult to address. As far as the future is concerned, we are firmly committed to engaging in this work. There are resource constraints, although no more than for any other organisation. Our signature on the second Irish Aid memorandum of understanding is testament to this commitment.