It will be the second half of next year when low-tariff South American beef lands on the European market, a leading beef analyst has predicted.

Rupert Claxton of GIRA, the consultancy and market research firm, has said that the EU-Mercosur trade deal is as near as done.

“It’s not actually signed yet but they’ve separated it into a commercial part and effectively a bilateral, communications, economic part. They’re going to do the commercial part first.

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“Chances are it’s going to be signed before Christmas. That doesn’t mean they’ll move anything until at least the middle of next year because the south Americans haven’t actually worked out how they are going to divvy up the quote between themselves.

“They haven’t done that because they’ll fall out with each other over who gets how much share. They are going to do it, they’ll work it out and we’ll start to see product move, I would suspect, by the second half of next year,” he told the Teagasc national beef conference on Tuesday night in Athenry.

Not panicked

Claxton said he wasn’t panicked by the deal because Europe can absorb the 99,000t of low-tariff beef that will come from the Mercosur bloc. EU beef production is going to continue to decline, he said. The beef analyst said that in 2018 the EU 27 were producing just over 7m tonnes of beef.

“By the time we get to 2026 forecast, we’re down to just over 6.5m tonnes. We’ve lost 830,000t of product in that period. And we’re worried about 100,000t coming in? It’s not a big panic.”