Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Fitzmaurice for raising this important issue. I know the price of beef and volatility of beef prices is causing enormous concern for farmers and rural communities throughout Ireland. The Government is aware that recent price volatility in the beef sector is causing huge difficulties. We are conscious that the sector is especially exposed due to factors such as Brexit and Covid-19 given its resilience and reliance on international trade and the food service and hospitality markets.

As the Deputy will be aware, prices for beef and other commodities are commercial matters which the Government has no role in fixing.

The Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy McConalogue, and his Department are working to ensure that businesses and services to farmers can continue, keeping food and other processing facilities operational, as well as ensuring that payments and commercial activities necessary to protect farm incomes continue. The Department is also working to ensure Irish beef has access to as many high value markets around the world as possible. The Minister, Deputy McConalogue, and the Minister of State, Deputy Heydon, are today having virtual meetings with customers in China, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

The nature of all markets is that prices will fluctuate, especially in the case of a market disturbance. That has been evidenced during the Covid crisis and also the uncertainty surrounding Brexit. The Government provides a range of financial aids to help beef farm incomes, as well as to support economic and environmental efficiency. These include the €300 million beef data and genomics programme. In addition to this, over the past two years more than €200 million was made available specifically to the beef sector, including the beef exceptional aid measure, BEAM, and beef environmental efficiency pilot, BEEP, schemes in 2019, along with the beef finisher payment and the beef environmental efficiency programme sucklers, BEEP-S, in 2020. In budget 2021, €85 million was allocated for specific supports for sustainable beef farming. This included more than €40 million for the extension of the beef data genomics programme during the transition period before the next Common Agricultural Policy. The beef sector efficiency pilot, with an allocation of €40 million, and the €5 million dairy beef measure were launched last week. Considerable financial supports are going from the Government to beef farmers and, to a lesser extent, dairy farmers.

The Minister has also secured €6 million in the budget for promotion of the suckler beef brand abroad. He continues to progress work around protected geographic indication status for Irish grass-fed beef. As trade Minister, I am working on that with him. We hope to extend this on an all-island basis in time.

Bord Bia's beef market tracker includes a comparison of the prime Irish beef composite price with a comparative export benchmark price based on weighted average of our key export markets. The tracker was put in place as a result of the work of the beef market task force and provides an additional measure of transparency for beef prices which is critically important.

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