The European Commission has published a Livestock Strategy, alongside a Protein Strategy, and the tone of it is different to what farmers have got used to. Livestock is described as essential to food security, rural communities, economic resilience and Europe's strategic autonomy.
The Commission puts around seven million jobs and roughly €400 billion a year behind that. Competitiveness is named as a central objective, along with bridging the financing gap for investment in sustainability and animal welfare, and promoting European livestock products abroad.
After years of livestock policy arriving as regulation, a document written to protect the sector is worth acknowledging.
Read it from the farm end, though, and the same gap is there.
The strategy is built on competitiveness and resilience. Both assume a producer who can see the market he is selling into. In Irish beef, he can't. The factory knows what it will pay before the trailer is loaded. The processor knows what it has sold forward. The retailer knows its margin. The man who reared the animal gets his figure after the animal is gone, and the official average paid for cattle killed this week isn't published until the week after next. By the time the number is confirmed, it's history.
You cannot plan an investment on that. You cannot time a sale on it. You certainly cannot commit to a ten-year sustainability trajectory on it.
Every ask in a strategy like this — invest, improve welfare, reduce input dependence, compete — is a forward decision. The farmer is the only link in the chain asked to make forward decisions with no forward price.
It's worth noting who had a detailed read of this strategy out within days of publication: the British Meat Processors Association, the trade body for the UK meat industry. That's not a criticism of them. It's what an organised, resourced sector does — it reads the document, works out what it means for its members, and says so publicly. The question is who does that job for the farmer, and on what information.
The Protein Strategy alongside it aims to cut Europe's dependence on imported feed protein. That's a genuine farm-level cost issue and worth watching. But feed is only half the equation. A farmer's margin is the gap between what he pays and what he's paid, and only one of those two numbers is visible to him in advance.
Strategic asset is the right term for livestock. If Europe means it, the people producing the asset should be able to see the market they're producing into. Price transparency at the farm gate costs a fraction of what the rest of this strategy proposes to spend, and very little in it works without it.
Real farm-gate prices, reported by farmers.
Source: European Commission press release on the Livestock Strategy and Protein Strategy — ec.europa.eu. Analysis of the strategy from the processing side was published by the British Meat Processors Association.