Grace O'Sullivan (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I shall speed-read my presentation. I thank the Minister for attending and for his statement. I was delighted to hear him talk about the marine sector because Ireland's greatest asset in sequestering carbon is our marine environment. It was good to hear him talk about adding value through creating jobs in the forestry and marine sectors.

Ireland is doing good work in addressing the production efficiency of our livestock agriculture. We have undermined that good work, however, by promoting an even greater concentration on ruminants with their particularly high greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time that concentration has also had negative impacts on water quality and biodiversity. Over recent decades our agricultural policy has increasingly specialised in livestock, particularly ruminant agriculture. We have put all our money into one basket and this policy will reduce our resilience to potential food security shocks and will increase significantly our greenhouse gas emissions compared with a more mixed and balanced agricultural sector.

This is not an issue for Ireland alone, as we share competence for agricultural policy with the EU. Although the EU has long proclaimed that climate change is an objective to be pursued across policy areas, the Common Agricultural Policy still fails to integrate climate change and continues to drive increased emissions from agriculture. It is not an EU issue alone. Increases in agricultural emissions are being driven by a global dietary shift towards being more emissions-intensive, more land-intensive and having less sustainable foods. The information from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is clear. Its review of the science of climate change mitigation demonstrates that agricultural emissions must be tackled on the production and demand sides. Specifically, as well as increasing production efficiency, we must reduce the amount of food waste, reduce over-consumption of food and shift food choices to more sustainable foods. Science also demonstrates that these changes will have major benefits for human health, including addressing the growing global obesity crisis.Unfortunately, the good work on production efficiency which Ireland is doing under Origin Green has been used to promote increased consumption of beef and dairy, the most greenhouse gas intensive foods. Not only are we doing ordinary promotion, we are sending anthropologists to distant countries to understand how to convince people to change their food choices to more greenhouse gas intensive foods. This is wrong. It shows our statements about sustainable food production to be hypocritical. I am particularly deeply concerned by the ethics of Bord Bia promoting the use of breast milk substitute in Asia.

Far from addressing the demand side of greenhouse gas mitigation in agriculture, Ireland is actively promoting demand for carbon-intensive foodstuffs. This must change. We also need a large-scale programme of restoration of our native mixed-species broadleaf forests, as well as the protection of our peatlands and wetlands which act as carbon sinks. Ecosystems will help us re-absorb the carbon we have put into the atmosphere, if we are willing to work with them and restore them.

Climate change is the greatest challenge we face. It will not be fixed by tinkering at the edges of our agricultural and forestry systems. Food Harvest 2025 and our forestry policy centre on Sitka spruce plantations,are in conflict with our climate commitments. We need fundamental changes.