The long-anticipated IFA-commissioned report on the beef industry – compiled by Jim Power – was published last week.
One almost harboured a suspicion that the IFA (Irish Farmers’ Association) might have been tempted to leave this report ‘on the shelf’ – were it not to draw conclusions that aligned neatly with the organisation’s own narrative.
So; what ‘narrative’ could we possibly be alluding to?
For many years, chest-thumping individuals (with political ambitions – farming or otherwise) have built their profiles (and risen through the ranks of farming bodies) by repeating the well-worn mantra that there is a mafia-like ‘cartel’ in the beef processing sector.
However, in one especially-telling passage in the aforementioned (106-page) report, Power noted: “If there is collusion, it is clear that the pricing impact is marginal, as Irish prices are not significantly out of line with international prices.”
Upwardly-mobile individuals
Upwardly-mobile individuals (within farm politics) also point to the fact that the most powerful processors are making unseemly and inordinate sums of money.
Such companies do make vast sums but, as Power alludes to, such turnover is fuelled by huge volumes of livestock (rather than high per-head margins).
Speaking to AgriLand’s Claire Mc Cormack this week, Power even posed the question: “If beef processing is so god damn profitable why don’t farmers do it…?”
At that scale of operation, the potential is there to make (or lose) vast wads of cash – based on the sheer number of animals being processed (without necessarily making a huge amount of money on each individual animal).
However, farm bodies – of various hues and creeds – have long since preached to their assembled brethren of a ‘promised land’ – a land in which good livelihoods for all farmers await…as soon as the ‘cosy cartel’ can be toppled…as soon as processors pass just some of their bloated margins to the farmers on which they apparently prey.
However, the more one hears this mantra the more one is tempted to think of it as a populist rant – the sort of lazy rhetoric that a hard-line opposition politician might drum up…in the midst of a looming election.
The modern way…
But this, it seems, is the way of modern politics – at an international level or at the farm-gate.
Nowadays, the onus on a budding leader is not to ensure that your each and every utterance is evidence-based; the over-riding prerogative is to gain traction and energise your ‘base’ – by telling them what (you think) they want to hear.
But any farm organisation that panders to populism does not serve its members well. It’s one thing to seek to legitimise the concerns of grassroots members; it’s another to expend energy, time and money (ultimately members’ money) on a journey laden with promises but little by way of tangible results!
Of course, we’re not naive enough to suggest that some processors have never engaged in ‘sharp practice’. Many readers will vividly remember the out-workings of the long-running Beef Tribunal, which dominated the headlines in the heady days of the early 1990s.
However, stoking suspicion and contempt (which, it must be said, can be a two-way street) for a fellow ‘stakeholder’ in a fragile supply-chain will not solve our problems in 2020.
It’s all too easy to characterise, for example, a rich processor as the ‘villain of the piece’ – a physical embodiment of country-wide farmer angst. But, as Jim Power puts it so starkly, there are “bigger [international and consumer] issues facing the beef producers”.