Political backing for sustainable food production

I have said before that a great, but largely unremarked, strength of the Irish agri-sector has been its resilience and vigour. Whether recovering from major sectoral shocks like bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in 1996, foot-and-mouth disease in 2000, or managing the adjustment to new EU/global policy constraints such as the abolition of export refunds in the mid-1990s, Ireland has delivered. The economic potential of the sector has shone through in its ability to maximise growth opportunities as seen since the removal of milk quotas in 2015.
To that list could be added the resilience demonstrated by the Irish agriculture sector throughout the recent Covid-19 shutdowns. During that time, up to one-third of the global consumer food market was shut and yet not a drop of Irish milk went uncollected or unprocessed, nor a single hour lost in the meat-processing sector despite export markets accounting for 90 per cent of Irish agri-food output.
The major current test of resilience, or route-to-market challenge, is surely the capability of the sector to maintain its global market reach and, thus, its unique economic impact across the Irish rural and regional economy, while improving  its environmental and emissions impacts.

General election observations
The general election allowed us to measure the commitments of the various political parties to Irish agriculture. While all election promises must be taken with a certain degree of scepticism, the party manifestos do provide some sense of how high agriculture registers on the priority scale.
According to its election manifesto, Fine Gael, led by outgoing taoiseach, Simon Harris, sees Irish farming as a vital, sustainable and an integral part of the Irish economy. In particular, he has committed his party to supporting policies and practices that are intended to meet our emissions-reduction targets. These include the adoption of a range of emissions-reduction measures based on Teagasc’s Marginal Abatement Cost Curve ( MACC). There is also a commitment to investing in a combination of greater slurry-storage capacity and more focused water-management practices, to deliver the improvements in water quality required to ensure the country maintains the Nitrates Derogation at a level of 220kg per hectare. That should make it feasible for highly productive Irish farming enterprises to continue to operate in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner. These commitments were also highlighted in the Fianna Fáil manifesto and, while the manifesto statements are essentially a reiteration of both parties’ policies and financial-support measures from the outgoing administration, farmers will take some solace from their inclusion. Planning for success is surely a much more constructive approach to addressing new challenges than advocating failure, which, unfortunately, has clouded a large part of the national debate around Irish agriculture over the last four years.

A negative approach
The public narrative in Ireland for several years now has been dominated by the environmental lobby, from An Taisce to the Green Party. A general narrative has advocated the notion that the only way to reduce Irish agri-related emissions or meet the requirements of the Nitrates Directive is to dramatically reduce livestock numbers, and to re-engineer Irish agriculture away from grass-based livestock farming with its current global export reach, towards a more plant-based, local organic-farming system.
Not only has this view been repeated in the media, it has also been pursued through the courts (examples include the failed legal challenge by An Taisce to the Tirlán cheese-manufacturing facility at Belview, and An Taisce’s case against the Government implementation of the Nitrates directive).
The onslaught against Irish agriculture has, furthermore included, not just a clarion call to ‘remove all the cows’ but a very public attempt to additionally promote the idea of sustainable food as being almost exclusively plant-based, thus excluding meat and dairy products. This is despite the fact that meat and milk constitute 80 per cent of annual Irish agri-food output from the sustainable foods category. 

It is also a complete contradiction of a myriad of nutrition and food-science reports including from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). It states that this exclusion of livestock-derived protein from the sustainable food category has no scientific or nutritional basis and is an unsustainable approach to global food nutrition needs, not to mention the economic wellbeing of millions of livestock producers across the world.
Is it any wonder that the latest manifestation of the anti-livestock farming narrative has now turned to attacking the Fine Gael/Fianna Fáil support for a generally more efficient, sustainable, forward-looking Irish agriculture sector, as being a cynical kowtowing to the rural vote.

People don’t vote for a future that excludes them. A feature of the recent US election and a salutary lesson learned regarding elections everywhere, surely, has been the phenomenon whereby working-class voters of different races and cultures are voting only for political parties and personalities that provide policies and investment programmes that guarantee continuing employment in manufacturing sectors. In America, this has meant traditional Democratic Party voters, white and black, many of them working class, deserting their traditional voting allegiances to vote for Donald Trump. This is because they see a Democratic Party proposing policies on globalisation and decarbonising the US economy that they believe would result in the loss of more and more blue collar manufacturing jobs across America.
Does the Irish Green Party, and its fellow travellers in certain urban-biased media outlets especially, really expect rational rural voters in Ireland to vote for  a future that they regard as excluding them? 
Moreover, is it not even more apparent, as the Mercosur agreement is due to be finalised, that the suppression of Irish agriculture is not only hugely detrimental to the rural Irish economy but will see low carbon-emitting Irish meat and milk production replaced by higher-emitting production from South America. Stipulations in the proposed Mercosur trade deal to exclude beef from deforested lands is non enforceable and meaningless. Suppliers will simply export that meat to countries with fewer qualms around where the meat is produced while the EU will salve its conscience by only importing product from non-Amazonian regions. Let’s not delude ourselves. The net result will be more deforestation. Meanwhile, the EU expands its exports of high-value white goods and financial services in South America, while keeping a ceiling on beef prices in Europe. Depending on your perspective, it’s a reasonable trade-off for everyone except European livestock producers, as well as naive environmentalists who probably don’t even recognise the environmental sleight-of-hand being played out.