Tom Barry (Cork East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses here today. This is an issue close to my heart. The multiples have the financial strength which protects them against the primary producer. I believe they need to display their profits here because when they deal with their suppliers in many cases they ask them to open up their books. There is a double standard. They dissect the books of their suppliers and decide if the supplier is entitled to any profit and if so how much. The State, however, does not know what is going on. This is double dealing and I do not like it. These are realities.

I hope everybody goes home today and remembers the word "potholing". I am not talking about Cork County Council sorting out a few holes in the road. This refers to a supplier selling a particular product and getting maybe €100,000 a month. Then its accounts show a dip for a particular month when it gets paid €50,000 and the buyer says it is filling a financial pothole and will get back to the supplier. The margins are tight enough in these contracts that this type of practice should not go on but it is going on. Market support is a kind phrase for hello money. There are many others. This is the elephant in the room. We are discussing these very serious issues which are crippling the primary producers in a country where agriculture is one of the main income streams. We have to deal with this. Obviously the multiples do not have the moral backbone to deal with it. Some are better than others and it is wrong to castigate everybody.

I do the shopping quite regularly and I agree with the witnesses that there are little or no price differences in branded products. I am one of those who go to several multiples for items which are better quality in some than in others.

They are using price promotions. One would need to work out the cost per millilitre or per gramme on an iPad. The consumer is not saving money; there is no transparency. As a person who grew up on a dairy farm the milk issue really annoys me. I saw how hard my father worked all his life and I appreciate how hard dairy farmers work. It is a 24-hour job, every day of the year. Their professionalism is outstanding and the quality of their product is amazing. However, they are being dealt with in an unfair manner. They came to this committee a short time ago and told us that they are slowly going out of business. This is shocking and wrong. They are going out of business because they are not getting a fair price for their product. These people are doing what we asked them to do but we need to protect them. The multiples are taking greedy profits on the back of these people's life's work and that is wrong. I hope that message is heard by the multiples.

When the price of milk paid to the farmers fell a few years ago to 26 cent a litre, the branded milk product was selling in the stores from €1.49. When the product price fell to 19 cent a litre we should have seen the €1.49 drop to around €1 a litre but this did not happen and the farmer continued to receive a price he could not sustain. There is a race to the bottom. The multiples are asking the primary producers to live on depreciation. People will have heard me make the argument before. Money is needed as profit but money is also needed to reinvest into the business, to put in the extra stainless steel and to abide by all the regulations. One of my colleagues spoke about the horsemeat situation. Can a consumer rightly expect to buy a burger that was sold for 8 cent when its actual cost should have been 80 cent? The consumer still pays out but is not getting the value or the truth. Our system of labelling needs to be examined. One would need to have a degree in food labelling to understand which was the country of origin. The primary producers have had a love-hate relationship with the Competition Authority over the years. I am a tillage farmer and I have seen shiploads of grain coming into the country. However, I appreciate that the authority has a job to do. The primary producers believe they are not being dealt with fairly. They believe that other parties on the opposite end of the equation are getting away with behaviour that is not being exposed whereas the primary producer is fully in the limelight.

The challenge for us all is to find a solution to the problem, perhaps by means of a mandatory code of practice because the voluntary codes have not worked. Our dairy farmers, cereal farmers and our small businesses build up business on the back of good behaviour only to find out that they are being put to the sword. This goes to the heart of the success of our food industry. We all have a role to play but we need solutions rather than talk.