Michael McNamara (Clare, Labour)
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434. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the circumstances in which prepaid envelopes are sent to farmers or made available to them at offices to correspond with his Department and whether there is any difference in practice between various regions. [44261/13]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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My Department, as a general rule, does not provide prepaid envelopes to farmers nor make them available at its local offices. However, under certain limited circumstances it does provide such items for the purposes of data collection, animal identification and surveys. For example, in bovine identification, keepers receive prepaid envelopes and prepaid white calf birth registration cards with their tag orders. Freepost envelopes are also supplied to keepers who use Animal Events sheets to register their births. All keepers who order tags are issued with these cards and envelopes. There is no variation in practices across the different regions.

Any error letters issued by the calf birth registration and movement agencies have a freepost envelope enclosed. This also applies to all correction letters. Similarly my Department provides prepaid envelopes to sheep flock owners and goat herd keepers with their annual sheep/goat census forms in order to encourage them to return their sheep/goat census forms which under national legislation they are obliged to do. The provision of the envelopes has helped my Department maintain a very high annual response rate and it reduces the number of times officials issue reminders to submit a census.

Prepaid envelopes are also issued annually to approximately 4,000 pig herd owners to facilitate return of the pig census form. Running an annual pig census fulfils EU obligations and is a valuable resource for the Department, underpinning both identification and disease control systems.