The Irish food board, An Bord Bia, has been asked to devise a strategy to enable Irish beef to regain market share in EU member-states lost because of continuing fall-out from the BSE crisis.
The percentage of Irish beef exports going to Britain and continental Europe has fallen sharply to "an unacceptably low level of 36 per cent of total output", according to the Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh. In 1995, the equivalent figure was more than 50 per cent.
The Minister announced the move yesterday at a food fair in Berlin where he called for a radical overall of Irish beef marketing. It was, he said, an attempt to counteract one of the main effects of the crisis.
"Our reduced presence in European markets, along with the recent developments in relation to cattle prices, points to the need for a fundamental review of beef marketing and export policy," Mr Walsh said.
While everything possible was being done to improve access to third-country markets for both beef and live cattle, he said, the indisputable fact remained that the long-term future of the Irish beef sector was in supplying higher quantities of top-quality product to EU consumers.
Mr Walsh said he had met the chairman and chief executive of An Bord Bia to discuss how this could be achieved and had asked the board to present an immediate strategy for doing so.
Speaking when he opened the Irish stand at Berlin Green Week, he added: "The efforts of Irish food exporters to Germany and of An Bord Bia deserve great credit. We have an enormous amount to offer today's EU consumer and the challenge to fully develop and exploit this potential must dominate the collective agenda of the Irish food industry."
