Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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209. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the progress to date in percentage terms and number of jobs created for each Food Wise 2025 target (details supplied). [46444/18]

Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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Food Wise 2025, the latest ten year strategy for the agrifood sector published in July 2015 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 sectorial recommendations.

If these recommendations are implemented, the expert committee, which drew up the Food Wise 2025 Strategy, believes that the following growth projections are achievable by 2025: increasing the value of agrifood exports by 85% to €19 billion; increasing value added in the sector by 70% to in excess of €13 billion; and increasing the value of primary production by 65% to almost €10 billion.

In July this year, I launched the third annual progress report of Food Wise 2025: Steps to Success 2018. This showed that by 2017 exports had increased by 15.9% and primary production by 8.9% compared to the baseline.

With regard to employment, Food Wise foresees the creation of 23,000 additional jobs in the agrifood sector all along the supply chain from primary production to high value added product development. It is not possible to attribute specific job targets to each of the value targets.

The CSO’s Labour Force Survey has replaced the Quarterly National Household Survey which has resulted in a recalculation of the employment figures. The agrifood sector continued to make a significant contribution to employment at national and regional levels accounting for 174,400 (7.9%) of total employment based on the 2017 average.

Steps to Success 2018 also showed that, of the 375 detailed actions which were due to commence by 2018 or are on-going actions; 74% have been achieved or substantial action has been undertaken; and a further 26% have commenced and are progressing well.