Beef producers under the cosh as prices plummet
Scotland’s beef producers are under the cosh as prices fall to a three-year low, NFU Scotland claimed yesterday.
Brexit-fueled uncertainty, an over-supplied market and a €100 million bailout deal for Irish beef farmers had, the union said, all contributed to a significant collapse in the market price for beef, undermining on-farm profitability.
Promising that it would be urgently pressing the issue with the Scottish Government, major retailers and meat processors at next week’s Highland Show, the organisation said that the last time prices had collapsed to a similar level had been in the immediate wake of the Brexit referendum result in 2016.
With the prices paid to farmers falling below 344p a kg, livestock committee chairman Jimmy Ireland, a beef and sheep farmer from Ayrshire said:
“When some supermarket burgers are retailing for more than 660 p/kg and Scotch sirloins going for more than 2200 p/kg, somebody is clearly making a living from the Scottish beef sector - but it’s not those producing beef on Scotland’s farms and crofts.”
He said that as finishers struggled to make a return, the pain was also being felt by and breeders producing suckled calves as prices dropped in the store ring:
Ireland added that the “emergency” £100 million deal currently being made available to Irish beef producers to cope with Brexit uncertainty had rubbed salt into the wound:
“The Irish may be facing Brexit uncertainty but that doesn’t come close to describing the current political situation here in Scotland and the lack of market confidence it inspires.