DEAR EDITOR

Year-to-date beef birth registrations are 40,000 behind what they were this time last year and 85,000 behind 2022. That indicates a 13% decline in just two years. Given the lack of urgency by the powers that be, the question I have is “are we being managed out of existence”?

The ICBF stakeholder forum is a case in point. This forum was announced as a mechanism to review/resolve the impact of the changes to the ICBF beef indices that were introduced last November. Many people hoped that the forum was an opportunity to finally get some alignment between the indices and what is actually delivering for farmers, but that hope diminished as it became apparent that its purpose was for the “exchange of ideas” and it had no role in deciding the direction of the indexes.

Impact

What I highlighted to the last forum, is that the impact of the changes has actually been understated to date, because if you add up the pluses and minuses for each trait of an animal, you will get a number €49 less than what is being assigned to it by ICBF. This means each animal’s value is artificially increased by €49, without which the reported genetic gains of the past 10 years would have been wiped out.

This fact only became apparent because after repeated requests, ICBF restored the graph on their website that displays the economic breakdown of the traits for each animal, which they had removed in November when the indexes were changed. Given that the average replacement index currently stands at €97, this “baseline adjustment” accounts for over half the genetic merit of the national herd.

The palpable urgency of the initial forum, demonstrated by the ferocious engagement by the majority of stakeholders, has now dissipated to a stage where many stakeholders are not sending their quota of representatives, with some not attending at all.

The disengagement by attendees is understandable when you consider the scheduling of these forums.

The last forum (25 July) had just three hours allotted to discuss 16 topics after a break of just under three months.

The next forum is scheduled for 7 November, which will be over three months. How can progress be expected to be made with such a schedule, but that may be the intention. Typically, the forum does not answer questions, but rather they are responded to them with more data, which usually leads to further questions needing to be addressed.

What is needed? is an independent mechanism to review and address, both technical issues and the impact of the indexes.