The Irish Origin Green sustainability brand: An evaluation of the relevance for New Zealand

Abstract

This project uses the Irish beef industry as a case study to evaluate the Irish Origin Green programme, its sustainability branding and the relevance of this to New Zealand. The study of the Irish Origin Green programme provides valuable lessons for the New Zealand beef industry's and its efforts to verify and communicate its sustainability credentials. It also has relevance to the wider New Zealand food industry. Through the work of Bord Bia and the Origin Green sustainability programme, the Irish beef industry has been proactive in developing traceability, quality assurance standards, measuring greenhouse gas emissions and promoting its sustainability brand. Origin Green has enabled the Irish beef industry to demonstrate that it is actively engaged in addressing issues of sustainability. It also provides data to verify Ireland's "green" credentials and has delivered what the beef industries large customers require to meet their own sustainability agenda. The New Zealand beef industry has lagged well behind Ireland in developing some key aspects of the Origin Green programme. For example, New Zealand has only recently developed a single quality assurance scheme for the red meat sector. Furthermore, New Zealand's National Animal Identification and Traceability scheme (NAIT) has been shown to have significant weaknesses and to have been poorly implemented. These issues are only now being addressed as a result of the recent outbreak of Mycoplasma bovis. Ireland has also led New Zealand with the measurement of farm-level carbon footprints and other sustainability measures. These have been available to Irish farmers since 2011. In contrast, the New Zealand beef industry currently has no comprehensive farm-level carbon footprint measurement system. This means it is not possible to give feedback to individual farmers on how their management practices affect their carbon footprint or to demonstrate progress. Furthermore, it limits the ability for the data to be aggregated to the industry level. This prevents the beef industry from validating its sustainability credentials and demonstrating progress in reducing on-farm emissions. The Environmental Strategy put out by Beef + Lamb New Zealand has set the target of reporting individual farm carbon footprints on all farms by 2022.