Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There is a shocking level of emissions from the agricultural sector. I think the Government has just talked itself into saying it cannot do this. It says it must not do it, but it does not know how we are going to reduce emissions. We can do it in many ways but the Government will not reduce the herd. That is absolute nonsense. There has been a policy in this State to increase the herd steadily since 2011 and to create export markets abroad where they never existed previously. The entire policy is based on a food strategy that is unsustainable. At some point, this Government is going to have to answer for that. Even the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has shown that the agricultural sector accounted for 37% of greenhouse gas emissions last year in this country. There is no way around that. The Government is going to have to do something about the size of the national herd and the demands from the meat processing industry in particular. It is not smaller family farms that are responsible for this; it is being driven by a food policy that is all about exports from the meat industry.

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