Ireland announces first EU beef exports to the US for 16 years
05/01/2015
Agriculture minister, Simon Coveney, said Ireland had worked hard to be the first EU country to start exporting beef to the US again, hosting US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, on in-depth inspection tours of Irish farms and abattoirs in the course of 2014 and paying return visits to Washington DC on two occasions.
Speaking on national radio on January 5, Mr Coveney said: “This is a great good-news story for the beef industry at the start of the year. We have been working on this for two years and it doesn’t look as if any other [EU] country is going to be entering that market any time soon. We are well ahead of the pack in a market that is paying more for beef than any other market in the world.”
Mr Coveney said beef prices are currently significantly higher in the US than they are in the EU and that he was hopeful of being able to sell large volumes of Irish beef into the US market.
“We are providing a different type of beef because 90% of the beef in the US is produced in factory-style feedlots where animals are fed grain and maize, but the market for ‘green beef’ or grass-fed beef, which is the norm for Irish beef, is now growing at around 20% a year.”
He put total US imports of beef in 2014 at 1.2 million tonnes, valued at around €4 billion. “This market is tailor-made for Irish product,” he insisted. “I’d be very disappointed if we weren’t selling somewhere between €50 million and €100 million worth of beef into the US market this year, but we have the potential to go way beyond that.”
Image shows Irish agriculture minister, Simon Coveney. Credit: European Commission.
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