Dairy farmers have issued a pre-budget demand for increased funding, warning that schemes to mitigate climate change will be rendered ineffective if more money is not allocated to them.
In a letter sent to Coalition leaders and Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue, milk producer Lakeland Dairies said the Government was now facing a “dilemma”, arguing that measures were needed to support farmers and the wider industry to meet climate targets.
“The current offerings are fragmented and insufficient to drive the necessary change,” chairperson Niall Matthews wrote in a letter addressed to Taoiseach Simon Harris, saying that without “comprehensive, well-funded support” climate targets will remain out of reach.
Mr Matthews further warned that without such supports, it could become necessary to revisit and reconsider carbon reduction targets themselves as they risked becoming unattainable. He told the Government that “the momentum initially created behind the Climate Action Plan has clearly slowed”.
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The path forward, he said, involved either committing to significant investment in supports for farmers to to “reassess the feasibility of the targets”, and warned that jobs in rural Ireland were at risk of being “slowly suffocated by unattainable expectations”.
Under climate targets agreed by the Government in 2021, agriculture needs to reduce its carbon emissions by 25 per cent from 23 million of carbon emissions in 2018 to 17.25 million tonnes by 2030. Doing so will require significant change to the agriculture and food production sector.
The Coalition has outlined a range of schemes designed to encourage farmers to shift to less carbon intensive forms of agriculture. Teagasc said last year that the goal was achievable but only if the highest level of ambition was applied and matched by the widespread adoption of transformative measures by farmers.
Mr Matthews told the Government that while “huge and tangible effort” had been made by sectors across the economy to hit targets, “it is likely that based on current projects, no sector will hit its target”.
“This would have serious implications and would be far from ideal,” he wrote.
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