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Bord Bia has decided to delay its farm sustainability programme for two months, its CEO Tara McCarthy has revealed.
She told Countrywide on Saturday that Bord Bia is not going ahead with the tender for the scheme for the time being.
“We’re going to take the next two months to stop, to review all of this, to speak with farmers, to ensure that no one is getting a surprise in what we’re doing,” she said.
The Irish Farmers Journal revealed that Bord Bia was planning to roll out the programme by the end of 2020, to draw together all ongoing work on environment and climate issues in agriculture.
She said that Bord Bia was not at a sufficiently advanced stage to roll out the programme.
Untold story
McCarthy said Bord Bia has been looking at sustainability and Origin Green and that there’s part of a story that’s untold yet.
“Farmers around the country are doing huge extra work that isn’t visible in their quality assurance audits … whether it’s smart farming, whether it’s all of the different initiatives they do, but no one’s capturing that - everything is working in its own little silo.
“So what we want to suggest is that we should have one platform that gathers all of this data so this isn’t asking farmers to do new additional things. This is asking them to capture the data of what is already being done and that allows us to tell new stories on their behalf,” she said.
Biodiversity
Giving an example, McCarthy said if 80% of Irish farmers are already doing biodiversity initiatives, Bord Bia can’t currently say that in its marketing of Irish produce.
“We can’t say that because we don’t have the data at the moment, we don’t have the proof point, but we’re pretty confident that there’s a lot of that data out there that we want to coordinate,” she said.
Criticism
Bord Bia came in for criticism from farmers after the programme was revealed and McCarthy said that the reaction has been negative so far.
“But what we believe is it’s how that has been explained and we will take responsibility for that one as well. So what we now need to do is start talking better, faster.
“There was a view that we were launching something - we’re not, we’re not at an advanced stage. But we do have a responsibility that when we want to talk about something, we do our research before we open our mouth. We did a lot of research on this first,” she said.
Exports
Commenting on the impact of COVID-19 on food exports, she said Bord Bia hasn’t been able to quantify the impact yet.
“We are tracking and we’re looking at CSO data. We will be coming out again in the next two or three weeks and we will be doing an analysis of what the first round figure is.
“It’s difficult to predict because you don’t know what the future is bringing. We obviously had our own plans … but we’re watching the plans of every other country around the world, and they’re evolving.
“So if you look at what Asia is doing what Europe is doing what the US is doing, it’s almost day by day, week by week decisions and that has huge impact.”
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