An initiative launched by the Agri-food Regulator will provide an insight into the value being realised by the big players in the meat industry for beef products.
Under the move the four largest beef processors in the State have agreed to share weekly reported values for beef forequarter, beef hindquarter and beef minced meat with the regulator.
The processors involved are ABP, Dawn Meats, Kepak, and Liffey Meats.
The Agri-Food Regulator said it had secured the agreement of the beef processors to share weekly reported values for beef forequarter, hindquarter and 5% fat content minced meat (500g packs), as provided by the companies to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine under European Union (EU) market transparency regulations.
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The regulator will aggregate the values collected from each processor to produce a single average figure for each of the forequarter, hindquarter and minced beef values.
The regulator said that these aggregated values would “provide an indicative price for the realisable value for beef at this stage of the supply chain and will be published weekly”.
Chief executive of the Agri-food Regulator Niamh Lenehan said: “The initiative to publish this information enhances transparency in the supply chain by providing an estimate of the value of beef accruing at the processing stage”.
The first report includes an overview of the methodology agreed between the processors and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, as well as the Regulator’s methodology when aggregating the reported values and is available on www.agrifoodregulator.ie – the website of the Regulator.
Ms Lenehan said: “The reporting now by the regulator is an important further step in improving transparency in the beef sector. We will continue to work with primary producers and their end processors with a view to publishing similar reports in the future”.
The Agri-Food Regulator is marking its first anniversary this week.
In September it said it had written to Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue to seek additional powers.
This came after a number of retail business did not co-operate with it on a report on the supply of eggs.
The chairman of the Agri-Food Regulator, Joe Healy, said at the time it wanted authority “to compel the provision of necessary price and market information from relevant businesses in the agri-food supply chain, in order to fulfil its price and market data analysis function”.
On Monday Mr Healy said that the request it had submitted to additional powers was still with the Department of Agriculture.
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