Mr. Gerry Loftus:

I thank the Senator for his question. I wholly agree with his remark that farmers are the custodians of the land, and so it should be, but with the amount of bureaucracy, legislation and so on, one would sometimes wonder who are the custodians.

We talked earlier about 1995 and the number of animals, cattle, cows and so on we had in the country. At that time the cattle numbers might have been similar, but there were considerably fewer cows. As we all know there is much less spreading of fertiliser slurry.

The industrialised business-led model we have adopted in this country has failed miserably. Let us consider the distribution of CAP. Of 120,000 farmers, some 53,000 are on a basic payment of €5,000 or less and some 27,000 are on €10,000 or less. Things have changed from years ago where everybody had everything on a farm and we were self-sufficient. Last winter at the time of the snow, if it lasted for another week many would have died of hunger. If we look at where the money is at the end of the year, is it in the farmers' pockets? It is not in mine and I do not know if it is for many. Because of this golden circle running Irish agriculture with corporatisation creaming the profits from the top, farmers have little or nothing.

We have heavily promoted the dairy sector. Much of this relates back to Teagasc which came up with the idea because of global warming and the increasing carbon in the atmosphere we were going to have much more grass, as we do. That has now resulted in major increases in our emissions, a dairy sector that is €1.5 billion in debt, and mothers and fathers who cannot sleep at night because they have signed up to loans for their sons and daughters to get into this racket promoted by many people, including politicians, dairy co-ops and farming organisations.

In fairness, Commissioner Hogan has given a serious hint to farmers over the past year in outlining where we were going with our emission targets and farmers were not biting the bullet. Most recently he talked about a cull and so on. We cannot continue to sacrifice our taxpayers at the rate of €600 million per year from 2020 to 2030. Why should they be sacrificed when people in responsible positions who should have directed us on a different road up to now did not do so?

The way out all of this is, unfortunately, going back a bit in time, decreasing production and putting in place proper schemes for all farmers. I am not saying that cows cannot be milked; of course they have to be. I am not saying beef cannot be produced; of course it can. However, we must look at diversification. Farmers could be doing many other things than producing excessive amounts of milk, beef or whatever. We need to look at it in a general context. We import far too much material, food and so on. For example, we imported 40,000 tonnes of potatoes last year, 20,000 tonnes of chip potatoes, 16 million tonnes of junk meal from South America that I would not give to anything. I would not feed it to my animals although some people are prepared to feed it and promote it. Then we sell this idea of Origin Green. Ornua, the company behind Kerrygold, is involved in a major court case over false advertising.

We are also seeing enormous rises in the incidence of diseases in people and I am not sure why. However, I am saying we should be producing top-quality food for the people of this country and we should also export whatever top-quality milk, beef, lamb etc. we can. First and foremost should be 100% healthy food.