Meat Industry Ireland (MII) has been called on to “furnish any kind of rational explanation” for the differential between beef prices in Ireland and similar markets.
The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) has said that the prices paid to Irish farmers were “yet again adrift of essentially similar markets”.
“As of May 6, and excluding VAT, the Irish R3 steer price was €5.24/kg. For the same animal in Britain the price was €5.61/kg and in Northern Ireland, it was €5.57/kg,” ICMSA Livestock Committee chairperson Des Morrison said.
“In Italy, the price was €5.91/kg, while France was €5.37/kg. Would MII or any individual meat processor like to explain to us why you could have these kinds of differentials between essentially similar markets?
“We’d particularly be interested in hearing why there’s a 33c/kg difference between the Republic of Ireland and our northern colleagues,” Morrison added.
MII is the industry representative body for the meat processing sector, with most of the country’s processing businesses making up its membership.
According to the ICMSA, the feedlot option for processors undermines the prices for winter finishers.
“It looks very much like the old tired and cynical story where the Irish factories are emptying out their own feedlots to depress farmer price,” Morrison said.
“The irony here is that they are cutting the money that would go to the winter finishers who they’ll be looking to for supplies next year.”
The ICMSA dairy chair expressed concern that farmers would not buy in forward store cattle for winter finishing “when the factories could do the same thing next year”.
“We would want to be very careful as an industry because we could end up with the only people able to finish winter cattle being the factory feedlots themselves and that won’t be beneficial for either them or farmer-producers in the medium term,” Morrison warned.
Factory quotes for finished cattle have seen very little change since the end of January and that trend is now continuing for the fourth month, with quotes remaining firm but no increases apparent.
This period of beef price stability in Ireland comes at a time when the supply of finished cattle in the first four months of this year is down 30,500 head on the same time period last year.