One of the negative aspects of doing business in the US is working around the quota regime. What can appear a quite liberal open trading situation can get frustrated by compliance with quota requirements.

For beef, the USA has open access for Canada and Mexico, from whom they imported 190,000 and 108,000 metric tonnes, respectively. By far the biggest supplier to the USA last year was Australia, which had a quota for 378,000t, of which 344,000t was used, and New Zealand, which had 213,000t, of which 186,000t was used. Argentina and Uruguay had 20,000t each, with Uruguay using almost all of theirs but Argentina sending nothing.

64,000t

That leaves 64,000t for others, and this is the quota that Irish beef would be supplied under, paying 4.4 US cents per kilo. It is allocated on a first-come, first-served basis and in 2014 wasn’t fully utilised, with 55,000t supplied.

That means that if nothing changed on the supply side this year, Ireland could get 9,000t in, and more if we are quick off the mark. This is expected to be more than sufficient to develop the business, though just how much Ireland might want to supply longer term when manufacturing beef gets approved and other EU countries enter the mix, as they surely will over the next year or so, remains to be seen.

When asked about quotas possibly getting in the way, Minister Coveney was anxious to point out that last year’s quota wasn’t fully used, with about 9,000t left over. He felt that would be more than enough to accommodate the high-value steak cuts, and indeed any quota difficulties would be a sign of tremendous success in developing this new market and that fence would be crossed when we came to it.