Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 10 February 2015

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Dairy Industry: (Resumed) Discussion

2:00 pm

Mr. Mark Cunningham:

One of the issues we have found - which is perhaps more acutely relevant now because of the fall in oil prices - is that there are low levels of hedging taking place across our business in general. Oil prices are at $50 per barrel and it is only when oil prices start to rise that one begins to see people looking to start fixing prices, which we have begun to see in the last ten days. We are working with the co-ops to try to ensure that we can come up with some commodity pricing instruments for them to enable them to forward purchase or forward sell some product on the market. We have already seen a number of the co-ops subventing or supporting prices based on some of the contracts that are in place. That is something we are working on with the industry but we believe that the products that will be brought forward will be initiated by the co-ops and the processing industry rather than by the banks. Obviously, however, we are very happy to act as an intermediary to try to supply those through our trading operations.

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