Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 17 January 2017

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Common Agricultural Policy Reform: Discussion

4:00 pm

Professor Alan Matthews:

If we consider the Origin Green efforts of Bord Bia and so on, they try to emphasise that. Deputy Cahill probably knows the figures better than I do, but one of the difficulties is that about 60% of the carcass ends up as mincemeat and it is very difficult to differentiate. We think of beef as the steak that one buys, but a large proportion of it ends up in a fairly undifferentiated product, so it is difficult to differentiate. I agree that to the extent we can do that, it makes sense to do so.