Farming re

Damian McCarney

After hundreds of beef farmers joined the IFA’s 24-hour blockade in Ballyjamesduff, a local farming rep predicts that common sense will prevail to resolve the dispute.
The sense of injustice felt over beef prices led the IFA to mobilise tens of thousands of farmers to stage protests lasting all night Monday and into Tuesday afternoon outside 30 meat processors nationwide, including at Liffey Meats plant in Ballyjamesduff. Meat Industry Ireland (MII) has condemned the blockade as both misguided and counterproductive.
The Beef Forum is expected to convene today (Wednesday) in a bid to resolve the dispute and County Cavan IFA assistant secretary, Richard Moeran, who took part in the Liffey Meats blockade, insists that Minister Simon Coveney must intervene to ensure “common sense will prevail” in a situation where farmers and processors are fundamentally interdependent.
Mr Moeran told the Celt that farmers had been pushed so far that they had no option but to make a stand with this week’s protests.
“I would equate this with a rubber band and, the more you stretch it, the greater the resistance and, at some point, the resistance is going to overcome everything else and that is exactly what happened. This was building all year.”
The protests were concerned primarily with beef prices, but anger had first been ignited by the abrupt tightening of beef specifications regarding weights and age categories for cattle at the start of this year.
“It meant that a lot of producers were caught with animals that were in spec one day, out of spec the next day,” explained Mr Moeran. “The price fall compounded it.”
Mr Moeran says that all farmers were willing to take “on the chin” the global fall in beef prices. However they found the ongoing discrepancy between the UK beef and Irish prices unacceptable. “In the last number of months, there was a gap between the price of animals being killed in the UK market, and the price of animals killed here, ending up in the UK market. That price gap opened wider and wider as the months progressed.”
He valued the difference in price obtained between an average sized carcass processed here, and a carcass processed in the UK, but both being sold in the same UK market at up to €350/carcass.
“If the market became so volatile that producers decided they would stop producing, that’s no good for anybody - it’s not good for the producers, it’s not good for the processors and it certainly isn’t good for the consumer because the price of the product will go up.”
In the course of the 24-hours, Mr Moeran estimated that over 300 farmers had taken part in the Ballyjamesduff protest.
MII however insist that the Beef Forum is the appropriate place “to engage on issues of importance to the sector, not the factory gate”, and claim that MII have offered to meet with IFA reps but the association has refused to attend.
Chairman of MII Ciaran Fitzgerald said that the blockade will only disrupt business, damage Ireland’s reputation with customers and ultimately will not impact EU beef market prices.
“Cattle prices are strengthening and the trend from the market is positive, therefore this IFA action is very unnecessary and questionable.
“While Irish cattle prices have been weaker this year (down 10-12% from the record high levels of 2013), prices across the entire EU have been reduced. This is a direct result of a significant drop in EU beef consumption, which has fallen by 700,000 tonnes since 2010,” he said.
Mr Fitzgerald claimed that the continued focus on the comparison of the Irish price with that of the R3 steer in GB is “over-simplistic, inappropriate and wholly misleading”.
“While output prices are obviously important, they are not the sole determinant of farm profitability. The IFA have continuously refused to engage in terms of on-farm efficiency, input costs and farm profitability. A refusal to focus on input costs and efficiency means that the key elements affecting farm incomes for beef farmers are not being addressed. MII members will not be scapegoated for the refusal of other stakeholders to focus on these areas.”