Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)
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9. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the status of Food Harvest 2020 Programme, including details of any analysis he carried out or commissioned into the expected effects of this programme on the environment; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [2302/16]

Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)
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The Minister has recently moved his attention to Food Wise 2025, the new ten-year strategy for the agri-food sector, which was published last July. He claims that the strategy builds on the successful vision of Food Harvest 2020. However, An Taisce concluded that the plan was nonsense and had no realistic assessment of its impact on the environment. An Taisce stated:

Overall, the draft report is unconvincing, inappropriately promotional, and quite difficult to follow even within its own framework. It is not in the national interest nor in the farm organisations' interest to have such a major agricultural policy plan based on such a flawed environmental assessment.

Does the Minister have details of any analysis carried out, or commissioned, into the expected effects of the programme on the environment?

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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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.

Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)
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The Minister might read Conor Purcell's article in The Irish Times today. I do not agree with everything the Minister is saying. Last March, he said that nobody in the Irish Administration ever suggested that agriculture was going to reduce emissions long term. In July, he assured me here that the mitigation and adaptation plans for the agriculture sector were on their way and were being informed by scientific evidence and research findings. Does the Minister have further information on what a mitigation plan for the agriculture sector might look like and how it might be consistent with increasing the output of the meat industry?

The Minister said that it would make more sense for the burden of emissions reductions to fall on other sectors of the economy. We all know that agriculture is hugely important to Ireland. It is our best indigenous industry by a mile and it is right that it gets great support from the State but does the Minister not think that we must rethink how we help it? Can we continue to increase the cattle herd and beef production and meet our environmental targets as well? The Minister says that the two are consistent but it is very hard to see how that is true.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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I do not disagree with a lot of what Deputy Wallace said. Agriculture does not have a free pass when it comes to climate change responsibilities. If we look at the performance of agriculture, we can see than since 1990, emissions from the agriculture sector in Ireland are down 10% while emissions from the transport sector are up 120%, so agriculture is on the right trajectory. Our dairy system, which is the fastest growing sector in Irish agriculture, is producing milk at the lowest emissions intensity on the planet along with Austria and New Zealand.

The point I am making is that we need to get better at doing that in agriculture. We need to reduce the emissions intensity. We are the only country in the world to measure emissions intensity at a farm level. We are measuring the carbon footprint of the herds on 46,000 beef farms - the emissions coming from those herds. Every dairy farmer in the country - all 17,000 of them - has signed up to a dairy sustainability programme which will involve a sustainability audit system on farm in those dairy farms to understand emissions, feed conversion efficiency, efficiency of the herd generally, animal health, protection of biodiversity and all the other measurements and benchmarks around sustainability. This is the way it should be. We need to keep pushing and encouraging farmers to do more around sustainability. We are spending €4 billion in the rural development programme. Some 70% of that money is focused on sustainability, on a GLAS or a beef genomics scheme, and on more efficiency and on ensuring we produce more efficiently at reduced emissions.

When I come across as being a bit defensive about our sector, it is not because I do not believe in the awesome challenge of climate change and the need for agriculture to respond to that. I give an honest answer when I say there is abatement potential in agriculture, and we can reduce the emissions coming from agriculture and increase output, but that other sectors, like transport, also have dramatic abatement potential in terms of reducing emissions in a way that agriculture probably does not have.

Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)
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It is interesting that the Minister brings up agriculture. George Monbiot published a powerful article in The Guardianlast month from which I will quote. In the article, he says that:

A kilogramme of beef protein reared on a British hill farm can generate the equivalent of 643kg of carbon dioxide. A kilogramme of lamb protein produced in the same place can generate 749kg. One kilo of protein from either source, in other words, causes more greenhouse gas emissions than a passenger flying from London to New York.

This is the worst case, and the figure comes from a farm whose soils have a high carbon content. But the numbers uncovered by a wider study are hardly reassuring: you could exchange your flight to New York for an average of 3kg of lamb protein from hill farms in England and Wales. You'd have to eat 300kg of soy protein to create the same impact.

My last point before that-----

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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Is the Deputy suggesting that-----

Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)
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The Minister told the Irish Farmers' Journal last March that nobody in the Irish Administration ever suggested that agriculture was going to reduce emissions long term. This is a bit worrying. What was the Minister's question?

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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Is the Deputy suggesting that we do away with the beef industry?

Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)
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No, I am not and the Minister knows this.

Seán Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, Ceann Comhairle)
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Has the Deputy finished his point?

Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)
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Of course, I am not suggesting it but I think we must work around it in line with dealing with climate change as well. We cannot ignore the challenges of climate change.

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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We are not ignoring it. We are putting Ireland in a position to ensure we are the most efficient food producers on the planet using the natural resources we have available to us and that when we look at climate change targets - unlike the person quoted by the Deputy - we also insist on calculating what the actual carbon sink value of permanent pasture, the afforestation of agricultural land in Ireland and other climate change-friendly crops in Ireland is as well as calculating the negative impacts of emissions coming from our herds.

Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent)
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Do we have plans to plant more forests?

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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We have. We have a very strong commitment to afforestation of agricultural land unlike practically any other country in the EU. We are spending not European money but Irish taxpayers' money - €119 million per year - planting trees on farmland between 6,000 ha. and 7,000 ha. This is a climate change strategy as well as a timber and afforestation strategy. We have challenges and agriculture does not have a free pass but we are doing a lot of good things in agriculture at the moment in terms of the climate change responsibilities we have. People need to look at that with a far more open mind than many people have.