YOUNG FARMERS were warned that the World Trade Agreement had not gone away and it would be back on the table again with the same conditions which Irish farmers objected to in July.
The warning came from Tom Arnold, chief executive of Concern and expert on world agriculture. He has a background in agriculture economics, and sits on a number of key UN and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development committees.
Mr Arnold told a conference session on "food versus fuel" at the Macra na Feirme rally in Galway that when the trade negotiations broke down last July in Geneva, there was a certain sense of relief in the farming community here.
"It would be wrong to say that it is gone away and an international agricultural agreement is unquestionably coming back on the table. I think there is two years for you to deal with some of the same pressures which will still be there."
"I do not think when those WTO [World Trade Organisation] talks restart that they will resume from anywhere other than where they left off, that is what was on the table when the talks broke down in July," he said.
"The world has taken its eye off agriculture over the last 25 years and it needs now to put its eye back on it and facilitate the changes that are needed." He added that most people facing starvation live in rural areas of the world.
"The key thing to dealing with hunger is to prevent it. The best way to prevent it is to ensure that pregnant women, and children under two, are properly fed.
"If this does not happen, they are stunted physically and mentally and this has long-term consequences," he added.
There needed to be policy changes in poor areas of the world where agriculture and rural development were suffering.
He called for more attention at national and international levels to be focused on nutrition problems.
Former Irish Farmers' Association president and businessman Tom Clinton said the natural thing would be to focus on producing food ahead of biofuels, but the US, the wealthiest country in the world, was the world's largest producer of biofuels - and yet 10 per cent, or 33 million, of its population were in receipt of food aid.
He was critical of the Government for failing to support other sources of alternative energy such as windpower, although we have great potential in wind-energy and hydro-generation.
West Cork farmer Stephen Shorten of GRO Oil, which produces biofuel from oilseed rape, said that unlike other energy crops, two-thirds of the oilseed rape crop went back into the animal food chain in cake form when the oil was extracted.
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