Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 12 July 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Development of the Sheep Sector: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Dale Crammond:

I touched on this earlier in the session. The US market is a key priority for us. We are doing everything we can to engage with the Department to figure out how it will work. In terms of US equivalence, they set high standards and they have a certain way of doing things. We need to be able to show that our food processing standards are equivalent to theirs. They might have a critical control point in a slightly different place so we have to work through some of those complexities. We are doing that and we are hopeful that we will be able to make progress in the very near future because it is a market that our members are very much interested in.