Mr. Patrick Kent:

There have been a lot of different contributions by various people, all coming at the issues from different angles, and Deputy Healy-Rae has raised some very valid points. A lot of us will be gone by 2040 but I wish to nail the assertion coming out of the United States that there will be 9 billion people in the world by 2050. Committee members will have to get busy to feed them because we will not be around to do it. There is massive development potential in southern Africa and the main aim of the assertion, which originated in the US and has been repeated by some people in this country, is to get GM produce into the African continent. It is a fallacy. If there is political stability, populations do not increase but remain stable and in Europe they drop at such times, apart from the effect of immigration. In Germany and Italy, populations are falling so it makes no sense to get farmers to produce more and get deeper into debt on a treadmill which they cannot get off, just so that large corporations can profit. Mr. Günther Oettinger, the EU Commissioner for budget and EU resources, stated that the CAP budget would be cut by between 5% and 10%. We cannot invest more if our budget is going to be cut just because the UK is pulling out. We produce food for the UK and it is a very valuable market.

Some 60% of Europeans do not want to eat GMO produce. We are doing some experiments on GMO products in this country and that is compromising the saleability of our food, despite carbon credits, Origin Green and other fancy things. Dr. Crowe said earlier that there had to be behavioural change and Ms Gillian Westbrook will talk about going back to basics in regard to agriculture. Some fancy research is being done on multispecies pasture but that is what farmers have been using for generations as 90% of what we have in Ireland is multispecies pasture. Monoculture farming has only come in recently, to ramp farmers up into being busy fools, and this has to be stopped. Grass-fed beef is a premium product and if one goes into pizza restaurants in Italy one will only get horse or pork. We have a premium-quality product that we are just dumping in the UK market and we are not even marketing it correctly. The EPA wants us to have 80% trees and to wipe out farmers but Teagasc will try to back the agricultural sector to some extent. There are GM experiments being undertaken in Carlow, despite the fact that not one farm in Ireland can grow GM products and nobody has any interest in doing so.

We have to get real and to get income back into rural Ireland. Sequestering carbon comes from proper agriculture, as does rotation of pasture, but there will be no farmers who can do if they do not get a proper income.

We need to address all of these issues.

On consumers' health, earlier someone mentioned that more calories were being imported into Ireland than being exported. That is because we are exporting protein. People are eating too much starch and sugar, which is why there is an epidemic of obesity and diabetes and all related conditions. People see the price of protein and end up eating too many carbohydrates. If they were eating protein and fats, they would eat much fewer calories because they would be satisfied. People become obese because they crave nutrition. They eat cardboard-type products such as maize, with the kernel removed, such as cornflakes, which one can eat all day and night but still be hungry two hours later. That is how people get fat. We have to address that issue.

I totally support the production of organic products and so on, but it is not for everybody. They are slightly more expensive to produce because they involves reducing production levels, but as an organisation, we have members who produce organic meat. It is not for everybody, but it is great for the consumers who can afford it. If anyone attended a G8 or G20 summit or a Bilderberg conference meeting, I guarantee that the menus would not include a non-GM or non-organic product. All of the top-level people in Europe or elsewhere in the world will not consume food that is non-GM, but they want others to do so. We want to stop that. If Teagasc wants to conduct research, let it do it in another country, but it should get it out of Carlow and declare the country a GM-free zone with immediate effect.