Joe Flaherty (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Ms Robinson. Moving on to the UTPs, we have the ten practices classified under the directive as black, which we take as a given. There is an element of concern about the six grey ones. We have had a number of years' lead-in to this and we have custom and practice. Many of these have been bedded in. There is an unfair advantage there to the retailers, particularly against the small food producers. There is probably going to be some capacity for the Minister to change that. Does he not think we should harden up on those grey practices or take a much stronger line? Really we should be drawing a line in the sand and saying that what is happening at the moment, where people are being asked to pay for marketing and merchandising in a store, is not acceptable and is putting an unfair burden on a small food producer. Many small food producers are coming to us privately because they do not want to speak out. They are telling us they have to assure a retailer a margin for value-added food in the order of 35% and are then getting additional costs, many of which are covered within those grey UTPs. Ideally, in a Utopian situation we should not have any grey practices. We should just have a list of 16 clear-cut UTPs. Does the Minister see a mechanism within the proposal whereby those grey areas can be phased out? Are we going to launch this but accept the six grey areas are going to continue indefinitely?