No contracts for the sale of Irish beef to Egypt have yet been negotiated, almost two months after the agreement reached to allow processors access to the Egyptian market.
And industry sources now are warning that this market will only come back slowly and that trading conditions are going to be difficult.
The market was worth around €254 million (£200 million) - representing 150,000 tonnes of beef - in 1999 and 2000, before it was closed to all EU beef following the BSE crisis.
The agreement in mid-November to allow only three EU beef producers - Ireland, the Netherlands and France - came too late for Irish suppliers to sell beef to Egypt for the Ramadan festival, which is a period of peak demand; beef was supplied instead by India and Brazil, which now will become Ireland's main competitors in this valuable market.
Processors say negotiations on contracts with Egyptian customers have restarted, but that nothing firm is in place yet. However, some contracts could be in place before the end of this month.
All the major processors are interested in the market, which was so profitable in the past. But the devaluation of the Egyptian currency in November and the downturn in tourism - the country's biggest industry - have made what was a buoyant market a more difficult one in which to trade this year.
Even when contracts are finalised, veterinary inspection teams will have to come to Ireland from Egypt to verify that the meat purchased is from 24-month-old cattle, as specified in the post-BSE agreement, and this will further delay the export of product.
Mr John Smith, director of the Irish Meat Association, said yesterday that as far as he knew, no contracts had been signed and he did not know when any would be concluded.
He said factories had been open since Wednesday but the trade was fairly quiet. Levels of stocks of beef were relatively low at the end of last year because of the reopening of the Russian market after the BSE scare. Last year, Russia took 47,000 tonnes of beef after it reopened, worth €101.5 million (£80 million), reducing stocks of beef destined for non-EU markets which would have gone into storage otherwise.
