The crisis over who should pay for rendering animal waste from meat processing plants - which has the capacity to close down the industry - will come to a head later today when offal from the first day's kill becomes available.
The Department of Agriculture withdrew its €410 a tonne subsidy to the renderers from March 1st and repeated yesterday that it cannot, under EU law, continue the subvention.
The meat plants have told the Irish Renderers Federation they cannot bear the cost, that this would have to come from the farmer. The subsidy was worth €16 on cattle, €2 on sheep and 10c on each chicken slaughtered.
The farmers have said they will not pick up the tab for disposal of the offal which is rendered into meat-and-bone meal and sent for incineration abroad.
Over the weekend, the parties adopted a wait-and-see position and the Irish Farmers Association appealed to the meat factories and renderers to suspend any increase in charges to provide a further week to sort out the matter with Government.
"If the Government does not respond positively this week, the Minister will have left producers with no option other than total shutdown with serious consequences for the livestock industry," said Mr Derek Deane, IFA's national livestock committee chairman.
The IFA has called a meeting of producers for tomorrow night in the Abbeyleix Manor Hotel, Co Laois, to discuss the matter.
The president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association, Mr Pat O'Rourke, said farmers would have to consider withholding supplies of cattle from plants if the extra cost was being levied on them.
A spokesman for the Renderers Federation, Mr David McDowell, said his members would be meeting later today to discuss the issue. He said offal from animals killed today would have to be removed by the end of the day by law and this would bring the matter to a head at some of the meat plants. He said his members could not carry the cost of transporting, rendering, storing and exporting for incineration.
The Department of Agriculture and Food said it could not continue the subsidy which was worth €43 million last year because it would be seen as a national subsidy to the industry here. "The costs involved are borne by the industry itself in the rest of Europe and the resolution will have to come from there," said a spokesman.
"We signalled the end of the subsidy last November and it has ended. We will continue to bear the cost of storing 170,000 tonnes of meat-and-bone meal which built up after the BSE crisis in 2001," he said.
The meat factories, now represented by two different organisations, the Irish Meat Association and the employers body IBEC, agree on one issue, that they would not be able to take on the additional cost. However, two of the major players in the industry, the Goodman Group and Dawn Meats, control their own rendering facilities.
