Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As the Deputy would expect, I am quite familiar with the food supply chain issues. I am certainly familiar with fuel, feed and fertiliser costs that farmers have had to endure in the past 12 months and even before that. As those input prices have fallen, we have also seen prices of agricultural products fall. With bonuses and so on, many farmers were getting more than 60 cent per litre for their milk for a period last year. That certainly has fallen now into the low 40s. That is a huge change to their margin. I have long been a strong advocate for strong producer groups, effectively co-operative type structures for primary producers of food, whether that is in beef or in other sectors, so that they can strengthen their negotiations, whether with meat factories or retail outlets, on price, on conditions of trade and so on.

We are setting up a new agrifood regulator that will look at more transparency in the food supply chain, which I think is necessary. We have seen a trend over the last decade or so of the percentage of retail price that primary producers get gradually being eroded. In some ways that is a slightly different debate to the one we are having today on whether consumers are getting a fair shake from food retail outlets with regard to where prices should be. We need to have both discussions in order that we do not damage or put even more pressure on primary producers in an effort to get prices down, when the margins that retailers are taking need to be the real focus. We also have to be transparent and fair on that too, given the scale of investment we have seen in Ireland by the retail sector. Let us work through those issues. I suspect it will be a focus of debate over the next few weeks.

I have visited Waterford Port.