Bord Bia has said an export benchmark price-tracker for lamb, similar to the beef tracker, cannot be built with any “level of robustness” at this time.
Although the Irish food board acknowledges that a price tracker would add “transparency” to the marketplace it has identified a number of factors, which it said would make developing an “accurate” price tracker “very difficult or impossible”.
According to Bord Bia there is currently no mandatory sheep classification and price reporting in the EU or the UK.
“Lamb prices are not available by individual grade or category, but, instead, average prices are reported on a voluntary basis by individual member states for heavy and light lambs.
“There is a lack of detailed data by grade combined with variations in how prices are calculated which makes it difficult, impossible to make like-for-like comparisons,” Bord Bia said.
The food board also highlighted that different regions report different weight ranges in order to ensure that lighter or extremely heavy lambs “do not skew the data”.
Bord Bia said that because of the variations in “weight ranges reported, dressing specifications applied and variations in maximum paid carcase weights” it would not be possible to make direct comparisons between the deadweight prices across the three regions.
“In addition there is also no differentiation in old or new season lamb when compiling reported prices.
“This creates difficulties when there are differences in the breakdown, proportion of spring lambs, hoggets across the UK and EU member states – particularly in the spring of each year,” it warned.
As a result the food board said that despite “several requests” from the industry for Bord Bia to develop an export benchmark price tracker for lamb it cannot “be built with any level of robustness at this time”.