As the controversy around Bord Bia and its Chair, Larry Murrin continues, it is very important to recognise the influence that large companies can have on decisions within State bodies and the consequent impacts on the wider communities.
The period between 2008 and 2012 was a time when the Queally family, intentionally or not, had a great deal of influence in Bord Bia. The Chair of the Board between 2008 and until December 2011 was Daniel Browne. He had recently retired after 27 years as the Managing Director of the Queally-owned Dawn Meats. His son, Niall, took over at Dawn Meats and Daniel stayed very actively involved as a board member and advisor while serving as Chair of Bord Bia.
Larry Murrin, part owner and Managing Director of another Queally family-owned business, Dawn Farm Foods has been part of Bord Bia almost since inception, serving on the Consumer Foods Board until taking over as Chair of Bord Bia in 2024. The current controversy surrounds his company, Dawn Farm Foods importing Brazilian beef.
In an article on the Dawn Farm Foods website posted in 2017, Mr Murrin noted that after the first four years of sales in Dawn Farm Foods and growing from €900,000 to €5 million, there wasn’t sufficient opportunity to scale to grow his business.
Luckily in 2010, Bord Bia provided that opportunity. The article states “Seven years ago, at the invitation of Bord Bia, Larry and a group of fellow agri-food heavyweights and intellectuals from Harvard University, gathered to create a new brand for Ireland.” It is not clear who in Bord Bia issued that invitation but clearly a lot of taxpayer money was involved because a report issued from those intellectuals at Harvard to Bord Bia, titled Pathways for Growth, and presumably the service was not free.
This document was primarily designed to support the export market, the processors that supply it and made recommendations to address their needs. The needs of primary producers, aka farmers, were not addressed. In fact, the Irish family farm, cornerstone of the sustainable Irish food reputation, was identified within the top challenge of ‘fragmentation’ facing the processors in scaling their export business. “Ireland has an inefficient production system. It has small farmers who lack the scale, capital, and/or readiness to adopt better technology“, the report states. It is perhaps not surprising that neither the Taoiseach Brian Cowan, nor the Minister for Agriculture, Brendan Smith, noted this detail in speaking at the launch of the report.
But Larry had a vision as he explains in the article on the Dawn Farm Foods website: “We concluded that it might be impossible to replicate, but we did believe Ireland’s clean, green, fertile, fun agricultural image could have global appeal with today’s consumers,” he said.
Messages including environmental, social responsibility and sustainability fed into the thinking pot, and the concept of Origin Green as a sustainability watermark of quality was born. Dawn Farms became one of the first food companies to be certified and supported the marketing of Origin Green through sponsorship of the Origin Green Ambassadors programme.
“We put our money where our mouth was, it was a tough economic time, but we fundamentally believe it is the right aspiration for Ireland albeit that it’s going to take maybe 10 years to deliver the real benefits of the vision.”
The report emphasised that a high-margin export business strategy was essential: “Given its lack of scale and cost disadvantages, Ireland is not going to win the commodity game. It must have a high margin export strategy. High margins occur because of scarcity: scarce supplies, controlled brands, unique products. They can also arise from solving problems for business customers: one-stop shopping, labor savings, on-time reliable delivery.”
High margin strategies can also come about by paying the absolute minimum for your raw materials. It is notable that in the entire report, only one page makes a mention of farmer incomes and that is in the context of farmers being able to use a sustainable and environmentally friendly image to boost incomes by hosting tourists in their homes or providing convalescent care. The idea that farmers should be paid properly for the food they produce is clearly not one that has occurred to the processors, Bord Bia or indeed, the Irish government.
However, while Mr Murrin was conceiving the idea of Origin Green and working within Bord Bia to create new standards of sustainable production for Ireland’s farmers that would boost processor profits and allow them to scale their export businesses, his mouth was not the only place he was putting his money.
In 2009, a €30 million joint-venture between Dawn Farm Foods and Minerva Sao Paulo saw significant investment by Dawn Farm Foods in Brazil – a country whose agricultural reputation is about as far as possible from the ‘environmental, social responsibility and sustainability’ that he needed to have Bord Bia require from Irish farmers in order to scale his export business as advised. Together, Minerva and Dawn Farm Foods would build a 10,000 square metre state-of-the-art cooked meats processing facility.
In 2012, by an unknown mechanism or amount of money, Minerva announced that they now had full control of the company, renamed Minerva Fine Foods. The nature of the ongoing business relationship between Minerva and Dawn Farm Foods, if any, is unknown. Origin Green coincidentally launched in June 2012.
However, it doesn’t stop there. In 2018, a paper published in the Nature, Ecology and Evolution journal titled “Tax Havens and Global Environmental Degradation” included Ireland in its list of countries incentivising deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil between 2000 and 2011. It specifically includes a loan from Dawn Farm Foods to Minerva in the funds from Ireland that, while not directly carrying out deforestation, heavily incentivised it. The total funds from Ireland are quoted as €3.3 million although it is unknown how many Irish companies are involved.
It is Bord Bia’s job to promote Irish companies in export markets but there must be a line in the sand somewhere between promoting Irish processors in foreign markets and being used as a de facto provider of specifically processor-focused market research, imposer of their needed standards, brand and image on farmers whilst ‘having no remit’ when it comes to passing profits back to the people who produce the food.
And more pertinently, there must be a line in the sand between Bord Bia and a processor who can utilise influence within Bord Bia to push Irish farmers into ‘environmental, social responsibility and sustainability’ while simultaneously funding deforestation in the rainforest to ‘fill the gaps in his supply chain’.
Make no mistake, having high-standards in farming and food production is needed and wanted in the farming community. The system of standards and audits is a positive for the industry. It is the disparity between the incomes of farms (maybe we aren’t doing enough B&B?) and the incomes of processors and the manner in which the system supports the growth in that disparity that lies at the root of the issue.
Somewhat ironically, today Dawn Farm Foods are Bord Bia Origin Green Gold Members and are positioned as passionate ‘sustainability champions’ on their website, successfully greenwashing any lingering traces overseas.
Mr Murrin must resign but that must be the beginning of building confidence in the credibility in Bord Bia as a true source for sustainable food. The produce from Irish farmers shouldn’t be tainted by the action of Bord Bia’s chairperson.
Sources:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/business/arid-20028070.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0497-3
https://www.farmersjournal.ie/news/news/irish-meat-company-linked-to-brazilian-rainforests-397275
https://www.dawnfarms.ie/origin-green-gold-member-2024/