IFA scores from set piece
It enraged about 5,000 farmers and their supporters enough to leave the land and travel to Dublin, to take part in a street protest organised by IFA.
The farmers set up a barbecue to cook Irish rashers and handed out bacon sandwiches to bemused passers-by.
Their protest attracted huge media attention. They told consumers they were paying 33 cents for an egg which farmers produce for 8 cents, and were paying 15 times more for a chicken than the production cost. IFA President John Bryan said it is retailers who make huge profits on these items, at the expense of farmers and consumers.
He said the farmer’s share of the price a consumer pays for milk has fallen from 42% in 1996 to 26% in 2009.
He said everyone knows what prices farmers are paid, what incomes they earn and what costs they have, that farming is more transparent than any other sector. But the same cannot be said for the retail giants and processors. Still it was farmers who get raided by the Competition Authority — but it has given IFA the platform to renew their call for a statutory code of conduct for the retail sector, an independent ombudsman to investigate abuses by retailers, and fair competition law. It wasn’t difficult for farmers to paint the Competition Authority in a bad light, by lumping them in with disgraced Government bodies such as the Financial Regulator.
IFA will consider their Dublin protest a good day’s work if they spread the call for fair play in food retail beyond their own members and into the sector that really holds power in the food chain — the consumers.
Their high profile reaction to the Competition Authority raid has also won them support in Dáil Éireann across the political divide.
It has brought back into the spotlight the Government’s commitment to enact the Fair Trade Act, which will ban a number of unfair trading practices in the retail sector such as ‘hello money’ which suppliers have to pay to secure a place for their goods on supermarket shelves.
The Government plan in this area is to merge the National Consumer Agency and the Competition Authority to allow for the introduction of a statutory code of practice in the grocery goods sector.
The opportunity has also been grabbed by IFA to expose Ireland’s slowness in regulating this area.
The Competition Authority raid looks out of place at a time when the EU is trying to give greater power to farmers relative to other players in the food chain, including the retail sector.
Across the Irish Sea, the British Government has published a bill to introduce a grocery code adjudicator.
Ironically, this will bring about the situation that sales of Irish farm produce, at least 80% of which is exported, will be better protected by fair trade legislation overseas than in the home market.
But that is little consolation to the dairy farmers here who produce liquid milk for the home market — or consumers who are unhappy with grocery regulation here — or the 70 workers who recently lost their jobs when a locally-owned supermarket closed in Nenagh, Co Tipperary — blamed on the big retail multiples in Limerick pulling away the shoppers.
IFA faces the possibility of big fines by the Competition Authority for alleged disruption by their members of normal business at Iceland stores in March, when they protested against plans to sell milk from Northern Ireland at 99c for two litres.
Nevertheless, it’s an important part of their business to sway public opinion in farmers’ favour — and the Competition Authority raid has presented that opportunity.
