Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. It is definitely not an easy time for farmers in Ireland. The war has just highlighted the huge issue that has been there for a long time. We cannot blame the Ukrainian war for our overdependence on a monoculture of dairy or beef and nothing else, because that is what has happened. We have been siloing farmers into one of two options and we see very little food grown. We must distinguish between food for people and feed for cattle. We must also distinguish between food security and feed security because they are also two very different things. We export much beef and dairy and they are not feeding the world; they are actually luxury items.

This war has shown two very important things, namely, that we must become more resilient and self-sufficient as a country to feed the nation and everybody who is forced to come here and that the farming model we have siloed most farmers into, thanks to certain lobby groups and big parties, is not fit for purpose anymore. That is what the Ukrainian war has really highlighted. Farmers have become so reliant on external inputs, as they call them, to the farm and borrowing lots of money to expand exponentially and to bring in things from outside the farm that cost them more. My experience, from many farmers I know locally who are not big dairy or beef farmers, which do not really exist in County Clare, is that the smaller farmer has also been forced to go down that road. There is so much stress for farmers to continue with that model whereby we are so dependent on nitrates, building big slatted houses and borrowing more and more money from the banks. I have seen suicides of good farmers around west Clare due to the financial pressures they were forced into because of the model of farming we have been practising in Ireland for far too long. There is nothing positive about war but it has made us face the reality of how inappropriate that system is. With or without the war we have always said fossil fuels and relying on fossil fuel products was never going to be sustainable in the long term because it is completely out of our control. We see that now and Senator Lombard has highlighted the costs.

I welcome the Minister's work on providing some financial incentives into tillage and the growing of other foodstuffs. I have friends who are organic food growers and seem to be doing quite well. Conventional vegetable and fruit growers seem to be struggling the most in some ways because their costs have gone up much more because they bring in so many other inputs. I also have friends who are organic growers of fruit and they seem to be doing very well. We see that with the organic dairy and beef sectors as well. I have not met an organic dairy or beef farmer who is giving out because they have not got so reliant on outside inputs to the farm.

For Senator Lombard and farmers like him who continue that practice, we cannot regress. We have a climate emergency as well as a fossil fuel, which is needed by all the farmers, emergency. The model does not work. We have been misguiding farmer into this model for years. I used to teach about Fairtrade bananas when I was a civics teacher and the smallest slice of the banana would go to the grower. We now have the same thing with the Irish steak or litre of milk, that is, the smallest amount is going to the farmer. It is not working and the Ukrainian crisis has shown why it is not working. There is too much emphasis on spending money on bringing more inputs into the farm instead of having a closed circle, as many organic farmers manage to do, which brings down their costs. It is time to face the reality and unfortunately we have been forced into that reality. It will also help us deal with many of the issues with water quality, soil erosion, the lack of biodiversity and the increase in the flooding of farmland due to our butchering of all the stuff that used to hold all the water back, like the roots of the trees or hedges.

We have been going down a very bad road that has not served farmers. Maybe it has served a small percentage of really big farmers who are happy to push a model that only suits certain sizes. The war in Ukraine has highlighted how inappropriate this two-sizes-fits-all model is. It is dairy or beef and go big or go bust, yet we cannot feed ourselves. We say we are feeding the world; we are not. We are selling baby milk formula to people who should be encouraged to breastfeed rather than buy formula. That is the reality of what is happening with much of the milk, unfortunately.