Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 1 October 2025
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture and Food
Challenges Facing the Tillage Industry: Discussion
2:00 am
Mr. Clive Carter:
I want to refer to food security. A few years ago, at the time of Storm Emma, I believe, one of the jokes going around was that you could not get a loaf of bread. The irony, related to food security, was that almost none of the bread was Irish. It was imported or made with imported flour. We have lost milling wheat for the most part, other than for a few small niche markets. That is something that really needs to be addressed because we do not have food security. At a meeting of the CAP consultation committee, we were told we were a calorie-deficit country. We export beef and dairy, but for almost everything else we import to a certain level.