Dairy industry on election alert

The outcome of next week’s general election will determine how the Brexit issue evolves throughout the UK over the coming weeks and months.
Mike Johnston.Mike Johnston.
Mike Johnston.

But according to Dr Mike Johnston, Chief Executive of the Dairy Council for Northern Ireland, a ‘No Deal’ remains the worst of all worlds for the local milk industry.

“And that’s still a possibility,” he said.

“We are currently peeling back the layers of the deal that Boris Johnston brought back from Brussels.

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“If this is implemented, it will have a direct bearing on how trade is managed within the British Isles and further afield.”

Johnston pointed out that additional bureaucracy, including the need for dairy businesses to fill in export summary declarations on produce leaving Northern Ireland for Great Britain, could increase local processors’ cost base, adding:

“Hopefully, a lot of form filling can be carried out electronically.”

Assuming Boris Johnson’s withdrawal deal gets the green light, the coming months will see two parallel streams of negotiation taking place – both at the same time - between the UK and the EU-27 for a FTA and on the implementation of the NI Protocol.

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Mike Johnston again: “The end game will be to marry the principles enshrined within a Brexit protocol for Northern Ireland and an over-arching trade deal.

“But these negotiations will not get underway until the beginning of March next year, which does not leave much time to get everything sorted out, assuming the end game is to meet a completion date of December 31st 2020.”

The Dairy Council representative confirmed that the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) is working extremely hard in the background, developing a series of scenario-based impact assessments, in relation to the Boris Johnson deal.

He continued: “DAERA officials are also liaising closely with agri-food industry representatives on these critically important matters. Assuming that Stormont remains in lockdown over the coming months, DAERA officials will represent Northern Ireland at the upcoming Brexit negotiations.

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“The local agri-food industry will not be at the table, but we need to be at the door while these talks take place. However, we will be making every effort to ensure that the needs of Northern Ireland’s milk sector are put centre stage as the Brexit negotiations unfold.”

Meanwhile, Farmers for Action (FFA) spokesman William Taylor has addressed the challenges which he believes are holding back the dairy farming sector in Northern Ireland.

Speaking in the run-up to this year’s Royal Ulster Winter Fair, he claimed that producer-owned dairy co-ops are taking supermarket orders at virtually whatever price could be softly agreed and coming back to the farmers for their profit.

He added: “The increasing power of the corporate food retailers and corporate food wholesalers is now out of control and therefore out of balance.

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“There is no chance of a fair price at the farm gate unless co-op owned dairy processors and others are prepared to stand up and demand the price they need to be able to return the cost of production plus a margin inflation linked back to their farmer owners.

“That price today is 45.62p/L according to an average across six prominent EU countries.