Irish beef factories may be forced to drop the price they pay for commercial beef or risk going out of business because German beef is flooding the EU markets, it emerged yesterday.
German beef is being offered at 30p lower than Irish plants have been paying, more than 90p per lb for tested beef over the past month. This development will place major strains on the Irish beef market.
Trade sources in Italy confirmed yesterday that companies there, attempting to sell Irish beef, were being driven out of the market by the German product.
Last week the Irish Farmers' Association complained that Irish beef plants were importing German beef which was displacing local product and forcing farmers to sell their animals for destruction.
A Department of Agriculture spokesman said the German beef was causing instability in the European trade, but Single Market rules had to be applied. He said what was happening was perfectly legal.
The EU Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, Mr Franz Fischler, had urged the Germans to begin slaughtering their animals for destruction and criticised them for failing to do so.
He praised the Irish and the French for getting involved in the destruction scheme which was set up as a market-support mechanism to take surplus beef off the market.
There are indications of a slowdown of the commercial kill in the last few days at Irish beef plants, and yesterday saw a number of major plants not buying for the commercial market at all, having the highest destruction kill since it began.
A total of 12 plants killed 4,432 animals for destruction, making the number of animals destroyed over 34,000 since the scheme began on Jan 10th.
However, the destruction scheme has hit difficulties here with a back-up of specified risk material at plants because of the inability of Ireland's only licensed plant to handle the volume.
This has led to a piling up of the SRM organs, where BSE can occur, despite blast-freezing before it is incinerated abroad. Factory sources said they could not continue to pay over 90p per lb for commercial beef while the Germans, who are not using the destruction scheme, were dumping 1.5 million tonnes on a declining market.