The Central Statistics Office (CSO) enjoys a reputation for independence. It is a respected and neutral score-keeper on the performance of the economy and on numerous other aspects of Irish life.

In 2022, the head of the statistics office in Turkey, Sait Erdal Dinçer, a professor at Istanbul’s Marmara University, was fired by the country’s president Tayyip Erdogan for publishing inflation statistics deemed too high by the government.

Several of Dinçer’s predecessors had earlier been given the chop, and his dismissal caused outrage in the international statistical community.

Transparency

That could never happen in Ireland, and politicians shrug when unpalatable figures come out from the CSO.

The organisation is fully transparent about methodology, and its officials invite and welcome queries about what it does.

The CSO admits that some of its figures are provisional, liable to revision, and its detailed releases are often sprinkled with caveats about, for example, the incomplete coverage of surveys due to uneven responses.

It also follows recognised international conventions and has contributed to their development over many years.

The CSO was quick to accept that the conventional measure of national economic activity, gross domestic product, had become seriously exaggerated due to the impact of the multinational sector and has fashioned alternative, and better, measures.

It also follows international procedures laid down by the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change in measuring greenhouse gas emissions, and produced a new report on 23 November called Decoupling Emissions from Economic Activity 2022.

The report received extensive media coverage, and the headline take-away was that agriculture was responsible for the lion’s share of total emissions, the greatest of any sector.

Six major emitting sectors were identified separately, accounting for 79% of total national emissions.

Agriculture is shown by the CSO as accounting for 39% of emissions on its own, but generating only 1% of the nation’s gross value added, a measure of income before transfers, and just 4% of total employment.

The smallest of the six sectors is called food, beverages and tobacco and is responsible for 2.8% of emissions, 2% of gross value added and 2.2% of employment, three shares much more in line.

Hostility

It is easy to understand some of the media hostility to farming if the emissions share is such a huge multiple of the share in value added or in employment.

The problem is the attribution of emissions in accordance with the system of the UN Framework Convention, which allocates emissions on a territorial basis, by production.

In contrast, the combustion of fossil fuels is allocated to the importing country, which seems fair enough. It would hardly be reasonable to ‘blame’ Saudi Arabia for the auto fuel consumed here, or Columbia for the coal burned in Moneypoint.

They are the low-cost producers, wherever consumption occurs and cannot be blamed for that.

But Ireland does not consume all the cheese or meat produced by the farm sector – it gets exported, and this is ignored in the emissions figures from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which follows the UN Framework Convention.

This helps to create a censorious attitude to farming, rather as if it were remiss of Ireland to be a major food exporter.

Recall that the 25% reduction in the target for emissions from agriculture was sold as some kind of concession, lower than the targets for other sectors.

You would not know it from the Irish media coverage, but there is an intense debate underway about this issue and not just in relation to agriculture.

The recent COP meeting in Baku almost broke down on the issue of sharing the burden of climate adjustment between developed and poorer countries, not about historical responsibility for colonialism but rather about the most efficient way to minimise the cost of adjustment worldwide.

There is a great unresolved issue, whether the adjustment is best undertaken on the demand side, by taxes and charges falling mainly on rich country consumers, designed to discourage consumption of carbon-intensive products and services, or by subsidies to new and speculative ‘green’ technologies.

Nothing to fear

Exporting countries with lower overall costs, including carbon costs, have nothing to fear from policies which seek to cut demand for these items in Europe, north America and elsewhere in the developed world.

These more fortunate countries are the principal sources of demand for carbon-intensive products and services.

Some of them have failed to take climate policy seriously, notably the United States, where auto fuel retails for about half the typical figure in Europe.

Measurement by demand rather than production, as the UN Framework Convention requires the Irish CSO to do, points policy in the wrong direction. Provided consumer charges are uniform, the producer with the lowest costs, carbon included, will win out.

For Ireland’s farm sector, the natural advantages in soil and climate would show through with rational measurement of emissions.