Last week, Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Charlie McConalogue announced that Irish beef can again be exported to China.
It is over two-and-a-half years since exports of beef to China were suspended.
Now that exports can resume, the government, Bord Bia, and exporting companies will go about the task of re-establishing Irish beef in the Asian country.
But what are the challenges to achieving this?
Speaking at the launch of Bord Bia’s Export Performance and Prospects Report 2022/2023 yesterday (Wednesday, January 11), Minister McConalogue said that part of that process will be providing political backup to the business-to-business engagement between Irish exporters and Chinese buyers.
The minister, along with Minister of State for new market development Martin Heydon, will visit China on a trade mission in May.
Responding to a question from Agriland at yesterday’s launch, the minister said: “We want to get up and running and get in there, working with companies as quickly as we can, so we’re going to build a significant trade mission.
“I know our meat companies are already working with Bord Bia, and have maintained contact as well over the last two-and-a-half years, but it’s really now about driving that on back up to the level we were at as quickly as we can.”
From a starting point of zero before Irish beef first won access to the Chinese market in 2018, the value of beef exports to that country stood at around €100 million when exports were suspended in 2020.
This, the minister said, shows potential for the market.
“If you look also at how the Chinese market has been developing over the last 10 to 15 years for beef, it is growing rapidly and [is now the destination] for 20% of total [global] exports,” he said.
“What we’re hoping to get out of [the trade mission] is working with our companies and actually seeing where we can be most helpful to them with their existing customers to make sure they get back up to where they were at, and also looking to develop potential with those companies and Bord Bia for new opportunities.”
Speaking to Agriland, Bord Bia director Jim O’Toole said there is work to be done for Irish beef to re-establish itself in China, as the market dynamic in the country now is different than it was two-and-a-half years ago.
“We don’t know what that’s going to look like exactly. It’s not going to be necessarily the same. There is a lot of competition from South America so it’s hard to put a number on it, but you would like to think that in the next 12 to 18 months we can re-establish the level of trade we had,” O’Toole remarked.
He said that there is still a network of contacts in China that Irish exporters keep in touch with, but that “the type of relationship you have when you’re trading week-to-week, that ongoing business, that has to be re-established again”.
He noted that Irish beef exports are facing some unknown factors in terms of Chinese consumers, particularly how they will behave after their experience of the Covid-19 pandemic.
John Murray, director of sectors for Bord Bia, issued a word of caution over how quickly Irish beef exports to China will return to pre-suspension levels.
“Where we are going to be in six months time, where we are going to be in 12 months time, it’s really hard to say at the moment. We would certainly like to see ourselves getting back to where we were prior to being blocked out,” Murray told Agriland.
“That’s kind of the first step, and then we would like to see growth beyond that over the course of 12 to 18 months,” he added.
According to Murray, some of the potential business contacts in China had already begun to make overtures to Irish exporters even before the reopening of exports had been officially announced here.
“There’s been good work done by Bord Bia and by exporters to maintain those relationships over that period, to maintain that interest, and to try to bring that back,” the Bord Bia official commented.