Been thinking about this €100m fund over the weekend. It strikes me, aren't we going at it from the wrong end??? "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. But teach him to fish and give him a lake to fish in, and he should be able to feed himself". So if there's a fer euro per animal paid out to suckler men or beef finishers etc, then it will satisfy them for a few months. But in reality, it does nothing in the medium or long term (6 months to 5 years) for anyone involved in producing animals for meat except set them against each other.
Ok, we know what the problem is. Put simply, there is an oversupply of cattle for the markets that we can sell into. This is caused by both lack of demand from these markets, and over production in Ireland. When we look back at years gone by when beef prices have been reasonable, its easy to identify hills and troughs in supply and demand. Its clear that a few things have helped and hindered beef prices in recent years.
1. Export of dairy calves - when we got a lot of them out of the country, it usually meant that beef prices in the year after that were stronger and vice versa.
2. Export of older cattle. Again, it took cattle out of the system to influence prices.
Everything that we read and hear about France, Spain, Netherlands, etc. is that they just can't get enough of our dairy calves to meet demand. The hindrance is the transport and lairage. I'd be all for our government setting up a committee to spend some of this €100m to set up short to medium term leases of proper lairage in Calais for our dairy calves to try to increase the capacity that we can ship over there. Another thing is to grant aid the purchase or upgrading of cattle haulage trailers to meet the proper requirements for shipping calves. Further to that, grant aid some of the shipping companies to increase carrying capacity for irish calves.
Beyond that, with Dairygold, Irish Agricultural Industry has developed the most recognisable butter brand in the world. This was a huge PR exercise. Boundaries were broken down. Walls were moved. Our beef industry needs to take example from this and new markets need to be developed across the world. The next 6 months are going to bring a huge opportunity for meat producers with the opening of the floodgates following China's meat crisis that us currently underway. As a country, and a brand, we don't seem to be able to get over certain small sticking points which as a whole, hold us back from developing our beef industry. Right now, we should have huge delegations of people visiting China promoting our beef - just as our dairy producers did 4 or 5 years ago. We should have an open invitation for for Chinese delegations to come here to view how we produce our meat and deals should be being hammered out and in place in order to meet China's demand once it hits!
I'd be all for putting money into that. As much as I would like a quick fix of a few euro in my pocket, I'd prefer to see a sustainable demand for our meat which would provide realistic prices for everyone in the production chain - not just a select few.