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The Agri-Food Regulator can swiftly investigate and prosecute companies which fall foul of the Unfair Trading Practices (UTP) directive in their dealings with farmers.
That is according to the regulator’s head of corporate services Aidan Kelly, who stated that the body expects to initiate more prosecutions into the future as more farmers become aware of their protections under law.
“It is quite a quick process when all the bits of paperwork and all the evidence is gathered,” he said on Thursday after the regulator secured its first court conviction against meat processor Asba Meats for the non-payment for a farmer’s cattle.
The body began compliance audits on companies operating in the agri-food supply chain, with future inspections to build on mandatory reporting that must be submitted by companies with turnover above €50m from next March.
UTP directive
The regulator said that these reports will contain a “huge amount of information and this is information we hadn’t previously got”.
The UTP directive are due to be updated at EU-level next year.
“They could change it fundamentally, they might bring in other unfair trading practices or they might change the circumstances around which an unfair trading practice is actually defined,” Kelly said.
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