The live cattle trade with Libya will begin again next month and should account for 80,000 cattle by the end of the year, Mr Seamus Purcell, the Waterford cattle exporter said. The trade was worth up to £70 million annually before Irish cattle were excluded by the Libyan authorities over fears about BSE.
Mr Purcell said he planned to purchase cattle for the trade in mid-October when he had delivered the cattle he currently owned to Libya.
Mr Purcell, who has substituted Australian cattle for Irish exports during the 2 1/2 years Ireland has been locked out of the Libyan market, said he expected that the market would take up to 80,000 cattle between now and the end of December. He would divert the ships he has been operating from Australia to carry cattle from Ireland and the first shipment would leave Ireland in two weeks' time.
Following a meeting with the national executive of the Irish Farmers' Association in Dublin, Mr Purcell said he felt that the reopening of the Libyan trade could lead to a reopening of the Egyptian market.
"It will bring a bit of competition to the market and it should help put a bit of confidence back there," he said.
Official sources indicated yesterday that it was likely that a Libyan trade office would open in Dublin next year.
The reopening of live cattle exports will give a much-needed boost to the cattle trade, which has been in sharp decline over the past six weeks since the Russian economy went into decline. It will also help to ease the fodder problem caused in some parts of the country by bad weather.
There was a broad welcome for the reopening of the market from the IFA, the ICMSA and the ICSA, the drystock farmers' association.
An emergency meeting of the IFA yesterday called on the Government to acknowledge the gravity of the income crisis and sought the extension of the Family Income Supplement to eligible families.
The IFA president, Mr Tom Parlon, said many farm families were now below the income threshold for a family with three children - £252 a week - but did not qualify because they were self-employed.