Failure to ensure competition in anti-parasitic market ‘will threaten viability of farmers’
The ICSA said it believes “there is a risk that excessive amounts of bureaucracy and burdensome red tape is being imposed on the agri-food sector”.
Farmers have stressed that a failure to ensure full competition in relation to anti-parasitics “will further threaten the viability of farmers”.
The Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers’ Association said this could affect the low-income cattle and sheep sectors in particular, and could “potentially lead to underuse of products”.
Farm organisations last week attended an Oireachtas meeting to engage with politicians on the Veterinary Medicinal Products, Medicated Feed and Fertilisers Regulation Bill 2022.
The bill provides for the making of regulations on the retailing of veterinary medicinal products, and for the introduction of a National Veterinary Prescription System, along with other measures.
ICSA animal health and welfare chairman Hugh Farrell reiterated the need for competition in the anti-parasitics market.
“Competition is critical when it comes to ensuring that farmers have access to anthelmintic doses which play an important role in animal health and thrive,” Mr Farrell said.
Mr Farrell suggested that the Department of Agriculture must ensure that it does not bring in rules which are anti-competitive.
The ICSA said it believes “there is a risk that excessive amounts of bureaucracy and burdensome red tape is being imposed on the agri-food sector”.
“While farmers are well aware of issues from the repeated use of one type of anthelmintic on cattle or sheep, this is exclusively a problem from the perspective of animal performance and health,” he added.
“ICSA believes that there is a real risk to competition in relation to anti-parasitic products which up to now have been sold by veterinary practitioners, licensed merchants including co-op shops and pharmacies.”
The association has said that the variety of outlets selling such products has been “critical to ensuring that products are available at a fair price to farmers without excessive markup for the retailer or for the pharmaceutical company”.
According to the ICSA, “this is especially the case for generic products which usually offer far better value than the original patented products”.
“Competition between outlets not only offers price benefits but also ensures that there are more pharmaceutical manufacturers competing to sell generic options,” the ICSA said.
A failure to ensure full competition “will further threaten the viability of farmers”, the ICSA has warned, and could lead to the underuse of products.
“This in turn would be contrary to the need for greater efficiencies in animal performance.
“Lower animal performance is contrary to the objective of finishing cattle and sheep at an earlier stage which is now a policy objective in terms of climate targets.”
In his submission to the Oireachtas committee on this, Irish Farmers’ Association animal health chairman TJ Maher said that restricting prescribing to only registered veterinary practitioners “significantly reduces the involvement of other stakeholders and service providers”.
This is in addition to removing “competition in the supply chain”, and creating a “two-tier system on the island of Ireland”.
“This approach has the capacity to severely undermine national efforts to implement better and more targeted usage of anti-parasitic products while providing significant incentives for illegal trade in these products,” Mr Maher said.
“Farmers will be faced with higher charges for medicines and rural communities will lose economic activity in their regions.”
