Green State Farms — Statement on behalf of Irish beef and sheep producers
The IFA Livestock Chair’s statement this week, calling on factories to stop undermining beef markets and demanding that Bord Bia step up its promotional activity, is welcome as far as it goes. But it does not go nearly far enough, and Green State Farms believes Irish farmers deserve a more honest account of why they are once again left exposed when market conditions shift.
The statement acknowledges something that Green State Farms has known detail: that the moment Southern hemisphere beef entered the UK market, Irish farmers were, in the IFA’s own words, left high and dry with their standards. Brazilian, New Zealand and Australian beef took their place. This is not a failure of promotional effort. It is the consequence of a quality assurance system that was never designed to protect farmers in the first place.
Irish farmers have spent years and significant personal cost complying with Bord Bia’s Beef Quality Assurance Scheme — submitting to audits, meeting specifications, adapting their management practices to requirements they had no meaningful role in setting. Green State Farms have documented, process by process, how those scheme requirements represent a transfer of management planning authority away from the farm to the processor, the retailer, and organisations administering the scheme on their behalf. The standards were designed to meet the purchasing requirements of major retail chains and food service customers. They were designed to give processors a marketing platform and a defensible supply chain narrative. They were not designed to give farmers a minimum price, a negotiating position, or any legally enforceable protection when a cheaper alternative appeared on the market.
The IFA calls on Bord Bia to launch a significant promotional campaign to win back customers. Green State Farms asks a more fundamental question: why does the organisation that collects a levy from Irish farmers and processors, administers standards built on the labour and compliance costs family farms, and claims credit for record export values in good years, have no obligation to those farmers when the market turns? Bord Bia’s mandate is to promote Irish food exports. It is not, and has never been structured to be, a mechanism for ensuring that the farmers who underpin those exports receive a viable return. The IFA has consistently supported and championed that architecture. Its response to its failure is to call for more promotion — more of the same activity that benefits the processors and retailers who capture the premium, not the farmers who generate it.
Green State Farms takes a different position. As a producer organisation operating under EU Regulation 1308/2013 and Irish market law, we have the authority and the mandate to negotiate directly on behalf of our members on the conditions under which cattle are bought, the price mechanisms applied, and the terms on which quality compliance is rewarded. We do not call on factories to do better and wait. We do not call on Bord Bia to run more campaigns and wait. We build the collective market power and the legal standing that means Irish farmers do not have to wait at all.
The current price crisis is not a communications problem. It is a power problem. Irish beef farmers have no enforceable floor price, no collective bargaining rights exercised in practice, and no mechanism to withhold supply in a coordinated and lawful way when prices fall below the cost of production.
Their quality assurance compliance gives processors a marketing credential and retailers a sourcing story, but it gives the farmer nothing when Brazil undercuts on price.
The IFA has lobbied against this reality for decades. Green State Farms is building the organisational structure to change it — because the only answer to a power imbalance is countervailing power, and the only way to exercise that power lawfully and effectively is through a properly constituted, farmer-controlled producer organisation with the legal standing to act.
Irish beef farmers deserve more than an annual cycle of lobbying articles and promotional demands. They deserve an organisation that works for them at the level where the decisions are actually made.
Green State Farms — Ireland’s independent farmer-led producer organisation for beef and sheep producers