Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We do have, absolutely, and I think An Taisce is wrong on this issue. Food Wise 2025, the new ten-year strategy for the agri-food sector published in July 2015, builds on the successful vision of Food Harvest 2020. It identifies the opportunities and challenges facing the sector and provides an enabling strategy that will allow the sector to grow and prosper.

Food Wise includes more than 400 specific recommendations, spread across the cross-cutting themes of sustainability, innovation, human capital, market development and competitiveness, as well as specific sectoral recommendations. Food Wise identifies ambitious and challenging growth projections for the industry over the next ten years, including an 85% increase in exports to €19 billion, and the creation of 23,000 additional jobs all along the supply chain by 2025.

Sustainability is at the core of Food Wise 2025 and the overriding precept of the strategy is that environmental protection and economic competitiveness are equal and complementary, and one will not be achieved at the expense of the other. That is very clear in Food Wise 2025.

I chair the Food Wise implementation committee and we have already had many conversations on the challenges of sustainability, emissions and climate change. We have also discussed protecting biodiversity and water courses. That committee, which includes senior officials from relevant Departments and State agencies, will drive implementation of the Food Wise recommendations. The high level implementation committee has met three times so far. The second meeting, which took place in November, dealt specifically with sustainability, which is at the core of the strategy’s implementation.

As part of the Food Wise process, an environmental analysis report was prepared in parallel. This environmental assessment was taken into account in drafting the Food Wise report.

The final environmental analysis report was published in December following a public consultation process. The Food Wise implementation plan, which was also published in December, included a supplementary list of Food Wise sustainability actions and recommendations in response to the final environmental analysis report. We have looked at this from an environmental perspective as well as from the perspective of competitiveness and business opportunity.

I also established an environmental sustainability sub-committee of the high level working group, which met for the first time earlier this week. Its role will be to evaluate and assess the delivery of sustainability and mitigation actions set out in the Food Wise strategy report and implementation plan, having regard to other relevant issues that may arise and providing advice, including on developments at international and European levels relating to climate sustainability as they relate to the agrifood sector thereby subsuming the work of the agriculture climate group.

Despite what some people like to say about agriculture in Ireland and our approach to climate change and sustainability, I would argue that we are doing more than any other department of agriculture on the planet to ensure that our plans for growth, expansion and opportunity for farming and agriculture generally are sustainability-proofed and that we are auditing as we go to ensure that we are meeting the targets we set for ourselves.

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