Agriculture is unsustainable as it is organised at present, both financially and environmentally, a conference in UCD was told yesterday.
Prof Frank Convery, Heritage Trust professor of environmental studies at UCD, was opening a session on agriculture, forestry and biodiversity at an environmental conference at the university, which continues until Friday.
Speakers are assessing the State's environmental and developmental performance some 10 years after the Rio de Janeiro Earth summit.
Prof Convery said farmers had financial problems. The big dairy farmers were boxed in by quotas and over time would lose out to markets in New Zealand, for example.
Smaller farmers would become more dependent on the postal service, i.e. the cheque in the mail, and would weaken over time.
He said both sectors of the farming community had problems with their children not wanting to take over farms.
Prof Convery said there were four environmental challenges. Concerning global warming, farmers were responsible for one-third of gases, mainly methane, in the atmosphere. There was a big challenge in acidification, particularly from ammonia. Other concerns were the enrichment of water and the reduction in biodiversity.
Farmers needed to be compensated and encouraged towards more organic forms of farming.
Dr John Feehan, department of environmental resource management at UCD, speaking on biodiversity, which encourages diversity of species of flora and fauna, said: "Natural diversity is not seen as a priority by government."
He said there was a low threshold of concern about environmental issues and this underlined the lack of education.
"Maintenance of biodiversity is about treasuring something without which our lives would be impoverished. The most immediate challenge is to tackle the problem of reaching the people to give them their birthright," Dr Feehan told the conference.