David Norris (Independent)

I am most grateful to my colleague, Senator Quinn, and I am very pleased he led off the Independent Senators because he has very clear and successful experience in retail. We must listen with attention and respect to what he has to say, although I do not fully agree with him. I am not a great fan of the free market and I do not trust Tesco. I do not believe Tesco has the interests of the Irish nation as one of its primary motivating factors at all and it needs to be watched very carefully. "The customer is king" is a good mantra and has worked very well for Senator Quinn, but the customer has no chance against groups such as Tesco and we must watch that very carefully.

In a situation where farmers get 20 cent for a litre of milk while in the supermarkets it costs €1.70, who is making the money? Where is it going? The public is entitled to know. I would like to know, because it sure as hell is not the farmers. People may be surprised I speak with some passion about the agriculture sector but my grandfather was a farmer in Laois and I know how difficult it was, even for people with fairly substantial farms. I feel great sympathy because this is one of the most important elements in our society. I say so for a number of reasons.

First, the economic impact is very much underestimated. People talk about the pharmaceutical industry. I listened with great interest today to the president of the IFA, a good Laois man I am very glad to say, Mr. Padraig Walshe. In a debate with Professor Alan Matthews of Trinity College, he made the point very effectively that the value added element in agricultural produce, particularly dairy, is a multiple of that of the financial services or pharmaceutical industries. It is much more significant than might appear from the stark figures alone. We must bear that in mind.

More importantly, let us think about food security in every aspect. We are a small island. This is an appalling economic situation. One of my colleagues, Senator Ross, talked about Armageddon in the financial markets and our economy. Yesterday I spoke at a conference at which Professor Dermot McAleese of Trinity College's economics department said he does not know where this is going or where it will end. One thing we always had was food, our capacity to feed ourselves as well as exporting. We would be very foolish to interfere with that in any way and to go the way of many European countries by importing food from hither and yon because it is cheaper. We should not bring in meat from Brazil, where we cannot test the pedigree, as we can with Irish produce. We should be aggressively marketing it to get over the dreadful mistakes that were made in the brand image over the years with beef.

If I have the figures correct, farm incomes in this country last year were €2.3 billion, of which only €300 million was generated by agricultural work by the farmers. The other €2 billion was grants from Europe. That is very interesting and tells something about our dependence on these grants. Unusually I am happy to support that. There has been a drop of 25% in farm incomes. That is astonishing. How do people live with this drop? Many farms are supported by families part of whose income is derived from work outside the farm. The farmer may work for a few hours every day on the farm, morning and evening, and then go out and work in the building sector. The building sector has contracted so they can no longer do that. What are they to do?

The prediction is that there will be 20,000 farmers left in approximately 20 years. That is an enormous drop and the majority of those will be big farmers with ranches. I do not particularly want to see that. I saw that happen in Rutland, the part of England to which my uncle, who is Irish, retired. It destroyed the countryside and habitat and led to a reduction in food quality. That is a significant factor.

I was astonished to hear Professor Alan Matthews, a man for whom I have the highest regard, talk about the necessity to take in cheaper foodstuffs. Taking in such products led to Creutzfeldt-Jakob, or mad cow, disease. He also talked about the possible necessity of taking in feed that contains genetically modified products. I ask the Minister not to do that. Laying aside the troubling scientific evidence, we have the situation where we have the possibility of marketing excellent brands as one of the very few countries in Europe, if not the only one, that has no taint of GM. To return to my colleague, Senator Quinn, that is what customers want, marketed properly. They will take the opportunity to buy such food and pay the additional price.

What a pity that in the middle of this very difficult situation, once again the two sides of this House appear to be playing politics. I saw no contentious wording in the Fine Gael motion, with the exception of the word "real" which might be irritating, but the Government should be able to get over irritation.