The news this week that Brazil has cleared the way to export to the USA, possibly starting as soon as the end of August, created another problem for the development of the fledgling Irish beef export business with the USA.

This is because Brazil will be supplying under the 65,000 tonne third country quota, the same one that Ireland supplies under. This problem is that with only 65,000 tonnes available to start with, of which 57,000 tonnes were used last year there is simply no room for more new business.

The unused quota from last year might just have been adequate for Ireland to supply low volume steak cuts.

However, Ireland’s ambitions, still not realised, is to supply high volume forequarter manufacturing beef for burgers and mince which has been worth as much as a euro per kilo more in the USA than Euro at times this year.

If successful, that in itself would probably have been sufficient to exceed the quota limit, and we would be moving into import tariffs of 26.4% for non-quota sales.

However, with Brazil talking about sending as much as 40,000 tonnes immediately and Brazilian exporters talking about this business growing to 100,000 tonnes within the next five years, this will cause havoc for existing Central American suppliers never mind new entrants like Ireland.

Argentina has also been granted access to the US market but that isn’t as big an issue as they have their own 20,000 tonne quota agreement with the US.

The ideal solution would be Ireland having its own arrangement with the US but we understand it was made clear to Minister Coveney when he met Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in February around the re-launch of Irish beef in the US, that there would be no separate quota deals with EU countries outside of the Trans-atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) discussions.