Ireland urgently needs to develop an effective crisis management plan to be ready should a major food safety crisis hit the Irish economy, according to Mr Larry Murrin, managing director of Dawn Farm Foods.

In a paper to be delivered at an IBEC food and drink federation conference in Dublin today, the head one of the Republic's most successful food ingredients companies warns the State as an island economy is particularly vulnerable to the effects of a crisis, such as the Belgian dioxin scandal. The current climate meant even the suspicion of failure was enough to undermine entire economies, he notes.

"We need to develop an effective crisis management plan which should be an integral part of our approach to food safety management in Ireland. Hopefully, we will never have to use it. But based on the Belgian experiences, it's vital we have it," Mr Murrin told The Irish Times.

Ireland had escaped a serious food scare, while in the past decade its food industry had performed dynamically on the world stage. This had been helped in no small part by the marketing of the State as clean, green and environmentally friendly island. "Sooner, I suspect, rather than later we will be called upon to substantiate this image and we can only do this with hard facts which international customers and consumers will understand and trust."

Whether food businesses liked it or not, everybody was bound together by their state of origin. Thus if "Ireland Inc" was to be the source of a food scare tomorrow, it would be very easy, and quite logical in some eyes, to contain the problem with a national export ban until the particular problem was traced and eliminated.

He added: "To a bureaucrat who must weigh up the issues, the fact that we are an island makes this all the easier and all the more attractive as a solution. Our diverse industries could share a common and disastrous fate at the stroke of a pen."

The resultant lost of confidence, credibility and trust - not to mention devastation caused to the industry itself - would take years to restore, he said. "This sounds like a nightmare scenario, but again we need only look at the dioxin scare in Belgium to see that it is entirely rooted in reality."

Prevention had to take the form of everybody becoming team players with a goal of national food security and taking ownership of every stage of the food chain, Mr Murrin said.