Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 21 June 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence

Pre-budget Submission from Dóchas and Global Food Crisis: Discussion

Photo of Sorca ClarkeSorca Clarke (Longford-Westmeath, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I have one supplementary question. We touched on access, availability and these new and not always positive coping mechanisms, for want of a better term. I am very concerned that there is a real risk of normalising the abnormal where copying mechanisms become so ingrained in communities they become the norm despite the fact that they were anything but for previous generations. If we see a cutback in aid donations and in tandem with that, a cutback in development aid programmes, there are people who are hungry and at risk of dying but there are also communities and societies that will not truly benefit from any loss or damage fund. Let us imagine that loss and damage will be agreed at the next COP and that a price or value will be put on it. That money would simply go back into communities and it would bring them back to where they were beforehand. There would be no substantial, meaningful benefit from that level of funding. In terms of the difficulties experienced in respect of access, because aid needs to be delivered in a timely fashion and to a proportionate scale, is there is a risk that accessing medical aid could be withdrawn? We focused on food today but food is not the only aid delivered to countries. Aid comes in very different shapes and sizes. Are we looking at the entire package of aid potentially being reduced or is it specifically around food?