Mr. Victor Chestnutt:

I thank the members of the committee for their questions and I will pick up on some that I think are relevant to Northern Ireland. Senator Paul Daly asked a couple of questions about how we are getting on lobbying in Westminster and the UK. The beef crisis is to the fore, especially with Scottish and Welsh beef, although not so much with the English. We are at the bottom of the pecking order, along with the Republic of Ireland, in prices because we export so much and the UK has a home market. We talk to them but there is no indication that they are on the same page as we are on the island of Ireland about the beef crisis.

I am a bull breeder so I am in that business. I breed two or three different breeds of livestock. My Charolais stock bull came from Yorkshire, through Stirling Bull Sales, and my Angus stock bull came from the South. It is imperative that we keep that going.

I also breed sheep and my stock ram came out of the South this year and there is that trade, but it is highly regulated and has a paper trail. Getting the right certification would be another page and it should not be impossible, so we will endeavour to try to keep those trade flows open.

Senator Marshall brought up the issue of beef and the Mercosur deal. We need to remember that environmental standards and the cost of labour mean that somebody in Brazil can run a village and not pay labour costs. Those are all the well-rehearsed reasons we should not have to compete with them on price. It is worth noting that it takes 88 kg of carbon to take in 1 kg of beef from South America, whereas one produced at home only takes 18 kg, excluding any carbon sequestration our hedges or grassland do. We cannot export our environmental problems if we continue to import beef.

The UK has proposed a free-trade deal for a certain amount of Brazilian beef, but even after that, steak cuts coming out of our factories in the North can sell wholesale at £11 per kg. The Brazilians can produce it at £6 per kg and the EU has cut its tariffs on that meat to £2 per kg. That effectively means that the Brazilians can still undercut our market by £3 per kg for those better steak cuts. That is a big concern going forward.

Senator Marshall also asked about the supply chain. We are making efforts but they are moving fairly slowly and we need to ramp up those efforts. We need a fully integrated supply chain. It is undoubtedly much slower than I would like and all of our organisations must keep working on that to try to integrate the supply chain.

On support for the beef industry and how we think it could be delivered, as far as I can see, there is only way we can get support for the beef industry in the long term. We have an island that can grow grass and that grassland needs management. It cannot all be managed by dairy cows. We need to support the beef industry for managing grassland and I suspect that this is one way we, as managers of our landscape, should look at drawing down support to the beef industry.

The Chairman asked if we regretted not calling for a remain or leave vote in the referendum. The Ulster Farmers' Union has a command structure from which we take our steer, and our farmers were well split. There are other reasons that people wanted to vote for Brexit. It is our job to look after the interests of farming but there are other reasons. People did not like the future direction of the European Union and there were other political reasons. We were not going to be drawn into the field. We do not regret the decision, which we think was the correct one. There are many people in Northern Ireland on both sides of the debate who would say we were correct in that.