The IFA showed how local action could bring global results, writes Seán Mac Connell, Agriculture Correspondent
When a small group of men met in an upstairs room in a midlands hotel in late 2004 to discuss falling cattle prices, they did not realise the course they embarked on would lead to the most successful lobbying operation mounted in the EU in recent years.
The decisions taken three years ago by members of the Irish Farmers Association's beef committee led last week to Brazilian beef being excluded from the EU, an action that has attracted attention around the world.
By early 2000, EU beef consumption was recovering in the aftershock of the BSE crisis of the 1990s but production had also fallen. The EU, which had a beef surplus for many years, began importing beef for its tables.
Irish producers and processors began to notice that Brazilwas exporting much more beef.
This began to depress the European price beyond the traditional countries serviced by Brazil, and led to the Irish producers, then led by IFA president John Dillon and then beef committee chairman Derek Deane, to concentrate on their competitors.
The job of working out the secret of Brazil's success and its weaknesses fell to Kevin Kinsella, a full-time employee of IFA, and he, with beef committee chairman John Bryan and Farmers Journal reporter Justin McCarthy, went to Brazil in May 2006.
Armed with the EU's Food and Veterinary Office (FVO) reports on the controls to prevent the spread of foot-and mouth-disease (FMD) in Brazil, which had broken out in October 2005, the IFA team went to look for themselves.
They reported back that the Brazilians did not appear to be taking the issue of food or animal health safety seriously. They observed animals moving unchecked from areas where FMD was rife.
Their subsequent report was, according to IFA general secretary Michael Berkery, "rubbished by the EU and official Ireland", but the association persisted with the demand that its competitors should not be allowed produce food at standards lower than those that applied in the EU.
The organisation stepped up its campaign to have a March 2007 EU FVO mission report on Brazil published. In May the IFA/IFJ team went back again to Brazil and found no improvements on what they had found a year before.
It also commissioned a scientific report that said FMD could be spread by processed beef and it sent a copy of this report, and a video of what they had seen in Brazil, to top officials, including the agriculture commissioner, Fischer Boel.
It also occupied the European Commission offices in Molesworth Street, Dublin, and later, at the ploughing championships in September, picketed a meeting which had been arranged by the commission. No farmer passed the picket.
The outbreak of FMD in Britain that August brought the IFA's campaign to the fore again but following publication of the commission's own FVO report, which was critical of the Brazilian system, a real breakthrough came when Boel wrote to commission colleague Marklos Kyprianou.
She told the heath and consumer commissioner that the IFA's report deserved consideration.
By Christmas, the EU told Brazil it would only allow 300 of its farms to export to the EU and asked it to prepare a list. Last week, Brazil came forward with a list of 2,500 farms it said could service the European market, but the EU rejected this and said it would accept no more beef from there until the agreed list of 300 was provided.
As those negotiations began, Boel was in Ireland, where she was given a commitment by the IFA that it would recommend a Yes vote to its members in the forthcoming EU referendum, something she described as a "huge gift".
As Brazil works to get back on track, other NGOs are pondering just how the IFA managed to get this far in a campaign that is estimated to have cost less than €200,000 and stopped the globe's largest beef exporter serving one of the world's largest markets.
