Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The direction of travel for Irish agriculture has been abundant for many years now. There has been a lot of commentary in recent times about a REPS-style support in the environmental scheme. That, in itself, tells a story. Long before the current debate around targets began, farmers were acutely aware of their role in landscape management and sustainable agricultural product and in many ways were indicative of what was needed in the international marketplace. That was long before the debate we are now having was under way.

We have had REPS, the agri-environment options scheme, AEOS, and we now have the green low-carbon agri-environment scheme, GLAS. Under GLAS, for example, we have what farmers sometimes bristle at, which is the lack of recognition that they have been working at this long before it became politically popular to talk about. Some 260,000 ha are under low-input permanent pasture. That is a low-intensity management system compatible with best environmental practice. Traditional hay meadow comprises almost 60,000 ha. There are hundreds and thousands of bird and bat boxes and such in terms of biodiversity. This is what farmers have been doing. The world did not begin on 9 February or any time recently on this issue, it is a journey farmers have been on for many years.

With due respect to Deputy Eamon Ryan, this term that he uses regularly, "genuinely origin green", is a disservice to the enormous efforts in which farmers are involved on that journey. To give an example, 250,000-plus carbon audits have been conducted on over 50,000 farmers' holdings to ensure they are not just genuinely origin green, they are origin green. If one has a product that is labelled "origin green", it is because it has met the audit requirements. It is a buy-in from farmers and from more than 260 food processors to the whole concept of putting our best foot forward on the international stage. That is not to say for a moment there are not other things we need to do. We need to make sure we bring people along who have been with us on a journey through REPS, AEOS, GLAS, organic schemes, the beef data and genomics programme, BDGP, which is lightening the carbon footprint on our beef sector to which Deputy Sherlock alluded.

This is a journey that continues. It is accelerating at a pace now because the backdrop is the biodiversity strategy, the Green New Deal and the farm to fork strategy. While they do not have a legal instrument at the moment, they will migrate across into Common Agricultural Policy, CAP, strategy. That is undoubtedly the case but we need to make sure we do that in the context of a growing global population that has to be fed and in a sustainable way that does not compromise sustainable food production.

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