Irish Examiner view: Revise shameful food plan and face reality

Food Vision 2030 was delivered as if climate collapse was a fantasy

An 11th-hour report to be published on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will warn that cutting carbon dioxide will not be enough to avoid a crisis. Picture: Sam Boal / RollingNews.ie

A little over a week ago Vice Admiral Mark Mellett, chief of staff of the Defence Forces, joined many of his international peers when he warned that climate change is the biggest threat to our way of life. 

He, like many of those responsible for the security of their country’s civilians, warned that climate breakdown is creating global conflict. It may be a forlorn hope but maybe his sober intervention will, at last, stir a realism that the ever-more dismal warnings from scientists failed to generate.

Just this week, scientists said they detected warning signs presaging the collapse of the Gulf Stream, the foundation of our temperate climate. 

Should its impact weaken or, God forbid, disappear, something pretty close to a new ice age beckons. Meath would become Manitoba. It is impossible to imagine change on this scale without the gravest concern.

An 11th-hour report to be published on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will warn that cutting carbon dioxide will not be enough to avoid a crisis. 

The IPCC will warn that we must swiftly curb methane in their starkest warning yet. They will also show in detail how close the world is to irreversible climate catastrophe. 

Methane is a carbon-rich gas, produced by animal farming, shale gas wells, or poorly managed oil and gas extraction.

Yet, in what must now be seen as a parallel universe where science is dismissed in a way frighteningly similar to anti-vaxxers, our Government this week endorsed a strategy for the food and drinks sector. 

Food Vision 2030 was led by the farm and food sector for the farm and food sector. 

It was delivered as if climate collapse was a fantasy in some excited imagination. This is confirmed by the fact that when a draft scheme was issued, the Environmental Pillar, representing 26 NGOs, withdrew as it could not endorse the business-as-usual proposals. 

Already grossly under-represented, the group says environmental voices were silenced and the industry was free to develop plans that threaten, and shame, us all. 

That Government felt free to accept recommendations from such an unbalanced group is disgraceful. 

That allowed Tuesday’s publication of a report that promises food exports rising from €14bn to €21bn by 2030. How this 50% jump might be achieved without exacerbating the role farming plays in climate destruction was glossed over. 

That the plan was endorsed by a Government in which the Green Party is a key pillar shows a lethal disconnect that will define their legacy and shape our children’s lives in a way that not even Vice Admiral Mellett will be able to control.

Just as earlier OECD proposals to confront farming — and other sectors too — were cast aside, this plan ignores much of what science understands and warns us today about climate collapse. 

As we’ve said before, this is no longer about economics or food export revenues, it is about our survival. Government must, before it is too late, find the gumption to insist that these plans be revised and be made sustainable in a way that protects all of us and not just food sector balance sheets.