Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 13 December 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Recent Reclassification of Beef Indexes: Discussion

Mr. Sean Coughlan:

That is the principle. Two things can be true at the same time. One is I can have sympathy for those breeders and understand the difficulties they are going through. The second is we are an independent genetic evaluation organisation that does not have a commercial interest in the animals. If somebody around our board had 50 bulls to sell and would be negatively impacted by us dropping or changing the indexes and we did not change the indexes because there was somebody on our board that had 50 bulls to sell, that would be a dereliction of duty of anybody on the board of ICBF. That is why we are an independent evaluation organisation. That rarely happens globally. The vast majority of organisations do the evaluations on animals on which they have a commercial interest. Those organisations are selling on one index and buying on another. If it is a global AI company, it runs down the stocks of certain bulls it knows will change at a particular point in time. Then it changes the index when it has all the stock shifted.