It has been called for the economic reality of climate change targets to be treated with as much seriousness as the scientific and environmental reality.
The calls have come from the president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA), Pat McCormack, who said that the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Richard Bruton, was correct in facing the CO2 reductions problem ‘head-on’.
McCormack expressed his concerns following a speech delivered last week by Minister Bruton.
However, he cautioned against the environmentalist theory that had farming as “a problem that could not be part of the solution”.
McCormack said that this moved Ireland into what was “a completely false ‘either/or’ choice”.
“We ‘either’ have a commercial farming and food production sector and excessive carbon production, ‘or’ we dismantle our farming and food production sectors, meet our carbon reduction targets, but wipe out the economic basis of most of the state outside the cities and larger towns.
To a huge degree, farming is the total of our rural economy and undermining it through fuel tax hikes will simply destroy the only meaningful economy in whole swathes of the state outside the cities and larger towns.
The ICMSA president called for the Government to “actually lead the agricultural sector and systematically assist and help it through the process towards meaningful carbon reduction while preserving its economic input”.
“Our farming and agri-food sector are disproportionately important to us and it is a comparatively low-emission food production system; those are two facts that Ireland just has to factor into the policy to lower CO2 emissions in line with our commitments,” concluded McCormack.