Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputies for their follow-up questions. To respond to Deputy Colm Burke regarding the EU response and the deviation in crop rotation, these issues are being looked at and the potential response to them will be worked through. Everything is being examined at EU level. There is also the area of set-aside being talked about, as well as the ecological focus areas, EFAs. If they could be ploughed again, that would, over a period and over a large area of the country, give us considerable extra ground. These are all issues that officials in the Department and the Minister, Deputy McConalogue, and the Minister of State, Senator Hackett, and I are continuing to engage with at European level to try to get maximum flexibility there for an appropriate response in that regard. I hope to have more clarity on that and the type of supports package that might be in place from the EU in the near future, even in the coming days.

Deputy Cairns raised points regarding seed, and Deputy Colm Burke raised the point about the amount of grain that is produced by Ukraine and Russia. While we do not necessarily import that directly or purchase it from them, we are part of the global food supply chain and if that 20% to 30% of grain is not produced because the war is likely to impact on that, it will have an overall impact on world food supply chains. What we want to do is ensure that our system in Ireland is as robust as possible. The points Deputy Cairns highlighted are valid in terms of ensuring not just the immediate focus of the next six to eight weeks of the spring crop planting season but also that we look at the years into the future, because the impacts of this conflict will be there for some time into the future. However, we have a very resilient and robust agriculture sector. Farmers are very good at working together, and have done so in the past. With the support of the Government, the Department and the farming organisations we met this evening, we will work together across all the industry, which has a key role to play here, to ensure we support the farmers to do what needs to be done to avoid a crisis. We do not have a crisis in food security right now and we do not have a feed crisis, but we want to make sure we do not have one next winter. That is why we must use the time we have now, the best available to us, to support farmers to do what needs to be done to secure the food supply chain into the future.

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