Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)

Food security in the European Union is the essence of what the new Common Agricultural Policy is about.

Growing populations and increasing demand for protein-based foods, which is what we predominantly produce in Ireland through the dairy and meat industries, present a significant opportunity not only to continue, as the EU has been, to promote a sustainable way of producing food from an environmental and climate point of view but also to produce greater volumes of food. We in Ireland have a blueprint to do that in the form of Food Harvest 2020. By 2020, we plan to produce 50% more milk in volume terms and to increase the value of beef exports by 40%. Likewise, we also plan for expansion and growth in the poultry, pig, sheepmeat and lamb sectors, and we have the capacity to do so.

In the recent past, CAP policy has been about deliberately restricting production in order to keep prices officially high within the EU as compared with prices outside the Union. That argument is no longer relevant because the increased demand for food has put prices outside the Union more or less on a par with internal prices. I will continue to make the case for sustainable intensification of food production, which is what agriculture should be all about.

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