The Ireland of today is a very different country from that of 160 years ago, when the failure of the potato crop, then the people’s staple diet, caused an Ethiopia-type disaster. A million people - a quarter of the current population - died in the Irish potato famine of 1845 and another two million were forced to emigrate.
The luck of the Irish has changed a lot since then. Today the Irish Republic is booming, with an economic growth rate of six per cent, the highest in the EU, and emigrants are flooding back to find employment at home. Such has been the avalanche of jobs created by the boom that, for the first time in its history, the country has had to recruit immigrants to fill some of them.
And yet, incredibly, amid all the new-found prosperity created by Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy - or, as some critics would claim, because of it - the potato industry is again in crisis.
Plummeting prices, falling consumption, declining acreage and vanishing growers - it’s easy to diagnose the industry’s problems. Finding solutions that will halt the decline and restore potatoes to their once premier position in Irish agriculture, and in the national diet, is the difficult bit, and may well be a mission impossible.
The statistics for the last decade tell their own grim story. Last year the crop totalled 31,144 acres, down from 39,254 in 1994, while the number of growers over the same period was more than halved, falling from 1,704 to 732.
The prognosis is just as grim. According to Teagasc, the Irish farm research and development agency, “the vast bulk” of the country’s 550 small growers - those with less than 70 acres - will exit the industry over the next five years. The investment and scale of operation needed, it says, means that production will be concentrated on some 160 major growers, who currently control 70 per cent of the national potato acreage.
But even for the big players, times are tough. Tom Maher, national potato specialist with Teagasc, sums up the last two years in three words: “Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful.” A market glut, as a result of good weather and bumper yields, meant, he says, that some growers were forced to sell supplies as animal feed for as little as €25 a tonne.
He is brutally frank in his analysis of the industry’s difficulties. “I don’t see any major changes in the years ahead. Potatoes may continue to be a viable crop for a small number of large growers, but they are unlikely to be a profitable one.”
The market situation, he feels, could become even more difficult when imports from Poland start flooding in, as their low production costs “will create difficulties for everyone”.
For Irish growers, the basic problem, he suggests, is that they are producing too many potatoes, given the market situation. Every country in Europe has a potato surplus, he points out, so there are no export outlets. An over-supplied home market puts pressure on prices and hits profitability, so increasing numbers of growers are forced out.
The focus, he feels, should be on developing the processing sector, as in the UK. “Over 50 per cent of UK potato production now goes into processing, while the Irish figure is closer to 10 per cent. If we are to put a floor under our struggling industry, we need to follow the UK lead. Almost 100,000 tonnes of processed potatoes are now coming into this country every year, and there is an onus on us to capture as much of this market as possible.”
Amid the gloom, one hopeful development had been the purchase of Ballymoney Foods in County Antrim by an alliance of growers from north and south of the Irish border. They raised over €2m to buy the plant, to the applause of politicians in Belfast, Dublin and London, and set about using home-grown potatoes to supply the lucrative frozen chips market.
But after operating for just over a year, and despite the high hopes and goodwill generated, the venture is now close to collapse. According to Maher, the plant has been unable to compete with cheaper frozen chip imports from the UK and Holland - and in the hard-headed world of business, it’s the bottom line that counts, however praiseworthy this particular effort at cross-border co-operation may be.
While potato growing is still spread across the Irish Republic, over 80 per cent of commercial production is concentrated in just six of the 26 counties, Meath, Louth, Dublin, Donegal, Cork and Wexford. First and second early varieties are Home Guard and British Queen, while maincrop include Kerr’s Pink, Record, Rooster and Golden Wonder.
Teagasc has a long-established potato breeding operation at its Oakpark research centre in County Carlow, and 16 of the varieties bred there are now in commercial production worldwide. The most successful are Rooster and Cara, with the latter now accounting for 10 per cent of UK production and also an important seed export to Mediterranean and North African countries.
Other varieties, such as Burren and Slaney, are said by Teagasc to have developed “significant export outlets”, with a relative newcomer, Emma, “displaying considerable promise as a ‘baking’ variety in the UK”.
Research is also being carried out on breeding varieties for seed export to the UK and Mediterranean countries, as well as on the control of late blight, liquid fertiliser use and the storage of tubers for the fresh chip trade.
Irish potato consumption remains the highest in the EU, with the latest figures showing that each household bought an average of 190kg last year. Remarkably, however, Irish production, at 500,000t a year, is the lowest in Europe, after Luxembourg.
Inevitably, as acreage contracts and more and more growers quit the industry, there is an apportioning of blame. Agriculture and Food Minister Mary Coughlan, speaking recently at a European potato conference in Killarney, pointed the finger at the retail multiples and said they must share much of the responsibility for the current crisis.
Buying power was concentrated in the hands of five or six retail multiples, who controlled over 75 per cent of the market, she told the conference. These multiples were demanding ever higher standards, but the higher standards came at a cost - and that cost was being borne almost entirely by the growers.
“It is critical that growers are properly rewarded for producing premium products,” she declared. “If that doesn’t happen, then the haemorrhage of growers from the industry will continue.”
It is a criticism echoed by John Sheridan, chairman of the potato committee of the Irish Farmers’ Association, who claims growers’ returns are being constantly squeezed in price wars and discounting by the multiples, with potatoes often used as loss leaders. “With investment in machinery and storage, production can cost from €2,000-€3,000 an acre,” he says.
“In the end, we’re lucky to get €300 a tonne, which is just enough to break even. Now many growers are asking, how much longer can we continue like this?” Despite the difficulties, he doesn’t share Tom Maher’s bleak view of the future. “I’m not a pessimist,” he says. “I think the industry can prosper if we can get our markets better organised - at present they’re bitty and disjointed - but because of our size, we suffer from problems of scale. That is why the UK, for instance, can sell potatoes here more cheaply than we can produce them.
“Tom Maher may be right in what he predicts, of course. I just hope he’s wrong.”
In her conference speech, Minister Coughlan, a native of Donegal, one of the main potato producing counties, raised the wider issue of declining consumption and the challenge posed by changing lifestyles and eating habits, and more ‘fashionable’ foods such as rice, pasta and quick-fix diets.
“Up until recently,” she said, “the potato was unchallenged as the most important source of carbohydrates in the Irish diet, but this is no longer the case. Research shows people are buying fewer potatoes and that trend is continuing downward.
“There is an image problem with young people. They seem to believe potatoes are time-consuming to prepare, fattening and unfashionable. In fact, the potato offers much in terms of convenience and versatility, as well as having an important role in a balanced diet.”
A priority for the industry, in Ireland and across Europe, she advised, must be “to tackle this image problem and actively promote the potato as a healthy, convenient food.”
In Ireland, that task is already under way. Bord Bia, which now incorporates Bord Glas, the horticultural agency, has commissioned a series of research projects on consumer attitudes, including focus groups in the 26-35 age range, questionnaires and shopper interviews.
The information gleaned will be used in a major promotional campaign aimed at putting the potato back at the centre of the Irish diet, just as it was 160 years ago.
DEHAENE DETAILS DISASTER
The Dehaene family has been growing potatoes in north county Dublin for more than half a century.
Patrick, a 41-year-old father of three - two girls and a boy - is the current standard bearer and he anticipates that his children - “after a good education” - will maintain the tradition.
Last year he had 120 acres of potatoes, yielding 15 tonne per acre, but with prices at €120-€180 a tonne, he didn’t even break even.
“The year was a disaster, one of the worst we’ve had.” Because of plummeting prices the previous year, he had cut back his acreage, eliminating some of the earlies but it didn’t help. He still has over 50,000t of last year’s crop in storage.
He accepts the short-term prospects are bleak: “Too many potatoes, too many sellers, too many growers doing their own thing. We need to be much more organised.”
But in the longer term, he believes the industry has a future and can offer a good livelihood. “The demand for fresh produce is increasing all the time, and so is the market.
“If we can survive the current difficulties, there could be much better times ahead.”
