Climate crisis and agriculture

Sir, – Dwight D Eisenhower famously said “Farming looks mighty easy when your plough is a pen and you are a thousand miles from a corn field”. I feel that the same disconnect is evident in this publication in recent weeks. The pontificating attitude from a cohort of individuals on the contribution which Irish farmers should make regarding climate change objectives is insulting due to its simplistic view. To be fair, they probably mean well but the by-product of reducing agricultural output would have unintended consequences.

The UN state of food security and nutrition report reveals that approximately 811 million or nearly 12 per cent of our fellow human beings are suffering from malnutrition. To reduce agricultural output would only serve to exacerbate that problem.

We are one of the most carbon-efficient producers in the world. With a growing world population, such a move would only drive food production to areas of the world which are less efficient and probably accelerate the rate of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest (the lungs of the world).

The other aspect I cannot figure out is why the affluent aforementioned cohort have not mentioned international air travel? This has increased by 2½ times in the last 25 years while bovine numbers have actually dropped from 7.64 million to just less than 7.4 million in 2021.