A major revamp of Bord Bia’s quality assurance (QA) schemes is required to keep pace with the changed market requirements and higher standards sought by retail and food service customers, Bord Bia has insisted.

Irish produce is competing in UK, European and global markets where their domestic produce is required to meet ever higher standards in terms of environmental sustainability, animal welfare and medicines usage.

“The market doesn’t stand still,” Joe Burke of Bord Bia told an Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) meeting in Sligo.

Burke, who is Bord Bia’s senior manager for meat and livestock, repeated the message delivered at a similar meeting in Cootehill, Co Cavan, last week that an update of the current QA regime cannot be pushed out any further.

The guarantees provided by Bord Bia’s QA schemes were no longer unique and were now being measured by customers against similar programmes operating in Ireland’s major export markets such as the UK, the Netherlands and Germany, he said.

Stricter controls

Burke pointed out that very high animal health and welfare rules and stricter controls on medicines usage were now standard requirements in QA regimes, such as Britain’s Red Tractor programme, Beter Leven in Holland and Haltungsform in Germany.

Emphasising the need for a revamp of the QA regime, Burke said these markets “don’t just buy Irish produce” and that Ireland had to respond to the changed needs of customers.

However, farmers at the meeting expressed reservations around the possibility of more onerous rules being imposed as a result of the proposed QA changes.

Financial gain

One farmer asked where was the “financial gain” from the QA scheme when farmers could get €170/head in the mart for 50kg lambs, which he claimed “far exceeded” the €7.30/kg being paid in factories for QA lambs.

Similarly, he said a flat price of €5.30/kg was being paid by factories for cattle, compared with a base of €5.05/kg for QA animals on the grid.

Meanwhile, Bord Bia’s Liam McCabe told the meeting that non-compliances on Bord Bia QA standards had been flagged by the Irish National Accreditation Board (INAB).

These included an absence of “metrics” on measuring sustainability.

McCabe insisted that any changes to the QA regime would be agreed and communicated with stakeholders, including farmer representatives, before being implemented.

Bord Bia aims to have an initial draft of the new QA standard agreed by the end of the year.

The meeting was told that the requirements on housing space for livestock would not go beyond current levels, that no additional space for nature would be needed to meet the new QA standards or that the rules around the use of low emissions slurry spreading will differ from current regulations.

The use of geo-tagged photographs to meet scheme conditions was also ruled out.