Mr. Fintan Kelly:

I will start in that case. I thank the Chair, Deputies and Senators for inviting the Environmental Pillar to speak. I am the agriculture and land use policy and advocacy officer at the Environmental Pillar.

The trajectory of Irish agriculture is a significant challenge in respect of the protection of biodiversity, water and air quality and the management of greenhouse gas emissions. There has been a long-standing societal failure to align the sector with planetary boundaries, our environment's carrying capacity and Ireland's legal obligations. Policies that have prioritised a productivist model of agriculture focused on specialisation, intensification and concentration have degraded our environment and locked farmers into an unsustainable commodity-driven food production system, which has left many economically vulnerable and at the mercy of fluctuating global markets and inequities in the food supply chain.

Notwithstanding positive environmental interventions, such as Ireland's world-class, results-based agri-environment schemes, successive CAPs have by and large failed to meet head-on our looming biodiversity and climate crises or the socioeconomic crisis facing many farms, particularly smaller farmers and those on marginally productive land. While there are elements of the CAP strategic plan that we strongly support, this CAP and other Government policies will, regrettably, fail to address the defining social and environmental issues of our time because, ultimately, they are not designed to do so.

As the main financing mechanism underpinning the social, economic and environmental well-being of rural Ireland, it is essential that supports are credible, targeted and measurable. Many of the proposed actions are not ambitious enough or targeted enough to deliver the degree of change needed. The level of ambition within the CAP strategic plan is not aligned with the level of ambition highlighted in various overarching strategies that span the same timeframe. The CAP is supposed to be the vehicle for change, but it is not clear what the roadmap or the destination is. For example, the EU biodiversity strategy has a target to expand protected areas to 30% of the EU's land and sea, with 10% strictly protected by 2030. It also sets the ambition to restore nature by 2030, and the Commission has promised ambitious binding targets under new restoration legislation. Agriculture is the leading pressure on protected sites nationally, but the CAP strategic plan is not tailored to rise to the challenge outlined in either the EU's biodiversity strategy, Farm to Fork, or the European Green Deal.