Ms Anne Randles:

Senator Comiskey asked about the market in Russia, the political situation and what could be done about it. It was a very unfortunate and depressing initiative which happened just as markets were beginning to turn. It is an annual ban, it has gone from August 2014 to August 2015, and it has been rolled over for another year. It is very much a political decision and with politics, as with volatility, it changes very quickly. It is very difficult to know whether the ban will be lifted but I believe the EU should be prioritising that. With the other political events happening in the EU outside the agri-food sector, particularly in France, there is a need for our international partners to get together to protect the homeland, as they say. Bringing Russia back into that process may help to change the political dynamism there.

With regard to the development and growth of dairy product markets, it is fundamentally important that the EU prioritises its free trade agreements. That is where we need to see effort and not only in trying to remove the ban in Russia. The TTIP negotiations with the US are a huge priority for us and are fundamentally important for the future of dairy in Ireland to give us more opportunities to grow trade across the board, be it our branded consumer business like Kerrygold or on our food ingredient side.

China is fundamentally important. It is not a market that has gone away, it may have just tempered its growth projections. It is unfortunate that we are on the back foot, to some extent, in accessing the Chinese market because our major competitors there have free-trade agreements. We would very much like to see the EU prioritise a free-trade agreement with China, at least for diary or agri-food if a multi sector agreement was not possible. We would like to see a request for the EU to prioritise a free-trade agreement because we are very dependent on exports. We have been growing routes to markets but we are not always in a comparable situation competitively with the other exporters to those major markets. That needs to be a priority.