ICOS have been involved in a longstanding campaign to retain voluntary origin labelling for milk and dairy products on behalf of the Irish dairy industry, in the face of massive pressure.

We have always felt that compulsory labelling would increase costs for the consumer, disrupt cross border trade, and lead to significant difficulties for many of our cooperatives with cross border milk pools in Northern Ireland.

ICOS has no problem with, and in fact strongly supports, voluntary schemes such as our own National Dairy Council scheme here in Ireland. And these will be able to continue unhindered with the recommendations in this report.

The report stated bluntly that to make dairy labelling compulsory would “require profound adaptations for operators especially with respect to milk ingredients of mixed origins”.

While the report did acknowledge that consumers’ did often look for origin labelling it did state that when consumers were asked would they pay extra for such information there  is a “discrepancy between consumers’ interest in origin labelling & their interest to pay for that information”.

It should also be noted that most dairy products already have compulsory labels detailing the plant of origin with the country initials beside, as show with the picture accompanying this article showing Belgian milk.

ICOS would very much point to how recent mandatory origin labelling for both the beef and sheep industries have resulted in significant difficulties in the trade in Ireland and the UK, where retail dominance around labelling  has been leveraged to cut prices to producers with no benefit to consumers.

ICOS would also contend that the complexities of the production of dairy goods would even make these problems even worse. Traceability and food safety has been an absolute cornerstone of the Irish dairy industry, and we are continuing this process with improvements at farm and co-operative level, but such a labelling regime would give us little benefit.

We have to be realistic here, we are a country that exports around 9 out of every 10 litres of milk that we produce and of those 9 litres, value has to be maximised to help create wealth for member owners. As rightly proud as we are of our dairy produce in Ireland, compulsory labelling would not help the objective of benefiting our industry, as we simply do not have the domestic consumer base where it would be an advantage.