Ms R?iseal N? Ch?illeachair:

Overall, the Cathaoirleach is absolutely right. There has been huge progress on nutrition globally, the work of scaling up nutrition and Ireland's support for both scaling up nutrition and wider nutrition interventions, but we have so far to go. Covid had a huge impact on not just the price of food but also its availability and the type of nutritious food people could access and gave us a necessary wake-up call about how dependent we were on very narrow globalised food systems. We are doing a lot of work with Irish companies and organisations, such as FoodCloud and other excellent initiatives that seek to increase the nutrition content of basic foodstuffs such as sweet potatoes, flatbreads, mandazis and so on, and many excellent initiatives are happening.

The biggest challenge we are seeing, not only in countries that are affected by conflict where food is being used as a weapon as in many countries, is the impact of climate change. Organisations such as Concern and Self Help Africa are making investments in climate-smart agriculture, where they try to work with farmers to ensure that crops are as climate resistant as possible. Extreme drought followed by great levels of flooding, such as in Kenya in recent weeks, are the sorts of challenges we are facing. When you have these shocks, the price of food goes up. Then the poorest people have to start making cuts, and as Ms Balfe said, it is women who eat last and eat less. That has an impact on the nutrition of pregnant and breast-feeding women and then their children. Those cycles are really challenging. However, I want to emphasise that there is progress. Nutrition for Growth, the big international summit, which will take place next March - it is held every five years - will mark the progress that there has been. We probably forget sometimes to emphasise the progress. Ireland's contribution to global nutrition has been exemplary.