It’s been quite some time since I pitched an article to The Irish Times op-ed page, despite having been a regular there some time back. The below piece ran on Monday August 17th, under the newspaper headline: ‘The food industry should not control our agricultural policy‘. I had first teased the idea of scrapping the Department of Agriculture and replacing it with a new Department of National Food Security in my book, The Lie of the Land, last September, but the idea has gained little traction. I thought now was a good time to bring it to a new audience, given events in Denmark in recent months have made it look like a far less radical proposal than it may at first glance have appeared. I was pleasantly surprised at the reaction to the article. A LinkedIn post I put up about it attracted over 18,000 views and nearly 40 online comments, so it clearly struck something of a chord. NewsTalk invited me on to the following morning’s breakfast show to discuss the piece. Initially, it was to be a one-on-one interview with the presenter, but they called back to – inevitably – add an Agri voice to the slot, in the form of the ICMSA president, there to rubbish my proposal the very moment it is even floated and to tell tall tales about our uniquely efficient, green etc. livestock sector. This is a common problem in media framing in Ireland. it’s tough enough to get a dissenting view on the industrial livestock steamroller into the public arena, and even tougher to get even five uninterrupted minutes to tease it out. Oddly, when the ICMSA or IFA people are invited on to radio shows to lobby for deregulation or taxpayer bailouts, as per the latest demand for drought-related handouts, it’s rare indeed to hear them challenged in real time by someone like me arguing against whatever it is they are demanding. Balance, it seems, can be a one-way street.
EARLIER THIS summer, Denmark, a country of similar population to Ireland, did the unthinkable: it formally scrapped its century-old agriculture ministry, the first EU country to do so.
In a move that read like a plot twist from the Danish political drama Borgen, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen unveiled its new Ministry of Nature and Animal Welfare. At least part of this radical revamp has been aimed at breaking the decades-long stranglehold of agri-industrial lobbyists on government policy. Sound familiar?
And while the Irish Government is now back-pedalling furiously on even our existing modest climate commitments, Denmark has upped its ambitions, aiming for an aggressive 85 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions within nine years, on the path to climate neutrality by 2045.
The main driver for this has been deepening public unease at the severe environmental, climate and animal welfare toll of intensive livestock production, which in Denmark is dominated by its 30 million pigs. This came to a head in the so-called “pig election” last March.
If there was a good case to be made in Denmark for scrapping its agriculture ministry, I believe the argument in favour of a similar step in Ireland is even more compelling and urgent.
The Irish State does not have an agriculture policy as such. While on paper it may look like our minister and his department officials call the shots, the real power has long since passed to the industrial players who dominate the sector.
If this sounds like an overstatement, consider Food Wise 2025, one in a series of policy documents all of which carry the government harp on the cover. Despite this, it was, in the words of then Bord Bia chief executive Tara McCarthy, “industry-owned”.
The other main function of Irish agriculture ministers in recent years has been to try to undermine climate action, both nationally and at EU level – as seen most blatantly when minister Simon Coveney in 2014 announced: “I will not allow a situation where the potential for growth and expansion in agri-food will be compromised by the setting of emissions limits.” His successors have all been broadly compliant with industry-led narratives that have put the kibosh on our national emissions reduction strategy – as seen with Martin Heydon’s involvement in the controversial Dublin Declaration of 2022.
Meanwhile, as Ireland fiddles, Europe is burning following a series of deadly heatwaves, with billions of euro in food production already destroyed this summer. This is playing out against a backdrop of profound ongoing global geopolitical and climate upheaval.
Ireland’s food production model – based on the mass export of beef and dairy products while, as Mary Robinson pointed out in a recent lecture, importing more than four fifths of everything we actually eat – has been exposed as reckless.
Our huge livestock herd has been hit by rolling fodder crises in 2013, 2018, 2022, 2024 and now again this summer, whether from drought, extreme rainfall or both. Despite most of Ireland’s farmland being dedicated to grass production, supplemented by millions of tonnes of imported animal feeds and fertilisers, we are still incapable of reliably feeding our livestock, while depending almost entirely on imports to meet the actual nutritional needs of the Irish population.
There have been calls in recent days to convene a meeting of our National Fodder and Food Security Committee. This, as the name suggests, is chiefly concerned with animal feed. The penny has not yet dropped that it’s only a matter of time before the climate crisis makes human food security an issue that can no longer be ignored.
Where is Teagasc, the state agri research agency in all this? With a budget last year of a quarter of a billion euro, it should be ringing the alarm bells on our chronic national food insecurity, but instead, Teagasc, dominated at board level by dairy farmers, has doubled down on promoting aggressive expansion of dairy in particular and downplaying its climate impacts.
The evidence points overwhelmingly to the need for radical reform. Our state agencies have in effect been captured by industry interests. The starting point for this is to dissolve both the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine as well as Teagasc and replace both with a new Department of National Food Security, one freed from industry interests and corporate ideology.
The first task of the new department should be to audit our critical national vulnerability to food shocks, and to lay out a roadmap for an Irish agriculture sector that is resilient, diversified, locally rooted and genuinely sustainable, with a strong emphasis on organics, horticulture and tillage. It should also look to establish a strategic national food reserve, similar to our oil reserves.
This would be the exact opposite of our current profit-driven monocultural model that is accelerating biodiversity loss, carbon emissions and water pollution while seeing farming largely reduced to commodity bulk food production that is almost completely cut off from its immediate hinterland.
Claims that Irish agricultural exports are “feeding the world” are baseless. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Ireland is a net importer of food calories, equivalent to the calorific intake of 2.5 million people.
And by selling high-emissions luxury food to the rich while fattening animals with imported grain and soya that could otherwise feed people in places where food is scarce, Ireland is also exporting food insecurity.
The 2024 Lancet Countdown report warned that climate change is already driving record-breaking threats to health and survival, including worsening food security.
We won’t be able to confront this existential crisis with the same flawed thinking that got us into this mess. And in these dangerous times, the most radical approach would be to carry on regardless, yet this is exactly the path Ireland is now choosing.
John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and author of The Lie of the Land – The Truth About Farming, Climate & Power in Ireland
