Brazil’s anti-Irish beef rant
However, we punch well above our weight in agriculture, and specifically in beef — which explains why the head of the world’s biggest beef industry recently lost his temper and bad-mouthed us in public, directing his over-the-top comments specifically at IFA president Padraig Walshe.
Ireland can boast the best beef exports in the northern half of the world, but we are dwarfed by southern giants, and it is Brazil which dominates, regularly sending nearly two million tons around the world.
Ireland exports about one fifth of that amount, plus up to 250,000 live cattle.
But it’s a heavyweight taking on a featherweight, when Association of Brazilian Beef Exporters executive director Otávio Hermont Cançado takes the trouble to put out a 1,000 word media statement running down the Irish beef industry in particular, and the British industry also.
The European Commission will tell you that complaints from Ireland played little role in their decision 20 months ago to nearly shut down Brazilian beef shipments to Europe. But Mr Cançado’s rant indicates otherwise. The beef restrictions, imposed at the start of last year by EU veterinary and food safety experts, interrupted Brazil’s unstoppable momentum as a global agriculture powerhouse.
Since 2003, Brazil’s agricultural exports had broken record after record. Their cattle population more than doubled between 1990 and 2002, as rain forest areas the size of small European countries were turned into huge farms.
By 2003, EU countries were taking almost 40% of Brazil’s huge beef exports. That was the year Irish farmers initially reacted, mounting protests against faulty meat labelling, which left consumers here thinking beef from Argentina or Brazil was from Ireland. DNA tests commissioned by IFA detected “zebu” tropical beef in 12 out of 53 samples being sold as Irish.
Europe was paying its farmers to give up agriculture, even as it enlarged and took on 74 million people in central Europe whose farmers could not feed them. Huge tonnages of beef were coming across the Atlantic from the “lungs of the world”, the tropical forests being taken over for cattle ranching.
EU member states were buying Brazil’s fresh and frozen beef, while the US, Japan, Korea and other Asian nations refused it, because of the south American country’s poor foot-and-mouth disease record.
Encouraged by European sales, Brazil’s beef production headed for a record eight million tons (compared to about 540,000 tonnes in Ireland). Brazilian exporters were able to ship high value cuts to the EU and pay an import levy of more than €3,000 per tonne, plus a 12% tariff, because they produce beef for one fifth of the cost in the EU.
Cheap land and between 25,000 and 50,000 cheap “bonded” workers helped the Brazilian Government use agriculture to join Russia, India and China in the BRIC group of fast-growing developing economies, and reduce the proportion of those below the poverty line from nearly 30% in 2002 to about 19% today.
But foot and mouth has always threatened its beef industry, and it struck again in 2005, with at least 50 countries banning their beef. Meanwhile, EU Food and Veterinary Office officials who carried out inspections were finding that the authorities in Brazil could not guarantee the food they sent to the EU was free of chemicals so dangerous that they are banned from farms in Europe. Most worrying, they found easy availability of clenbuterol, which has caused more chemically derived food poisoning in Europe than any other substance.
The barriers came down on January 31, 2008, when the EU banned Brazilian beef from farms not deemed to meet EU standards. For this, Mr Cançado takes out his frustration on Irish and British farmers, saying they object to South American beef “as if they were still in primary school, kicking and screaming to attract attention and achieve their objectives. “It now remains to be seen how long the ‘Irish child’ will take before it matures and becomes a competitor up to our standards,” he ranted.
He defended Brazil’s foot-and-mouth disease record, and said, “On the other hand, Ireland has a very unfavourable track record, especially when it comes to mad cow disease.”
He has advised Irish farmers not to waste their precious time worrying about Brazilian beef, and instead improve the health of their own herds.
They should stop believing that their subsidies will prevail, and that absurd government grants will be eternally available. “What we cannot accept is that the bad should prosper, while the good are punished,” said Cançado.
IFA president Padraig Walshe has been accused of defending an industry no longer capable of growing in the global market.
But we think he won’t lose any sleep. Instead, they will be having a good laugh in the Irish Farm Centre in Dublin, as they relish the effect of their campaigns in the Sao Paulo office blocks from where the world beef trade is controlled.
