WHAT China presents on the animal welfare front, as the trade of what is expected to be very large numbers of Australian slaughter and feeder cattle draws closer, has been put under the spotlight by leading academics.
Their conclusion is the modern, mechanised Chinese slaughterhouses cattle will be going into are far more conducive to high animal welfare standards than what exists with many of Australia’s other live trade markets.
Despite concerns about the way cattle are treated throughout China’s domestic beef supply chain, the dynamics of how the trade is being set up with Australia present little opportunity for leakage from our world-leading Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System (ESCAS), according to University of Queensland senior researcher Dr Scott Waldron.
A member of the university’s China Agricultural Economics Group (CAEG), Dr Waldron and fellow researchers Brooke Edwards, Colin Brown and John Longworth have just released a comprehensive independent report looking at the potential China offers Australia’s beef industry.
CAEG has been investigating the Chinese beef industry and other ruminant livestock industries in China for more than 20 years.
While China’s growing middle class is creating enormous demand for packaged beef, it is the prospect of the live trade juggernaut - touted to see a million head sent to China a year - that seems to be getting the most airplay.
Dr Waldron said the live trade industry’s ability to gain a social licence to operate at home would be critical to fulfilling the potential looming in China.
“The Chinese are very conscious of the fact animal welfare is a big issue in Australia,” he said.
“Both private and government companies are asking extensively about training in animal handling and slaughter.”
China had been under a lot of pressure to introduce animal welfare law, stemming from both its own citizens and international agencies, Dr Waldron said.
“They have had animal welfare law drafted and in the pipeline for a long time but it has not been introduced because of the logistics of implementation,” he said.
“The fact there are hundreds of millions of farmers and tens of millions of cattle traders means it would be impossible to enforce due to the sheer logistics of the numbers involved.”
The report, called The Sino-Australian Cattle and Beef Relationship, says animal welfare standards for cattle within China are, in general, not high, at least by Australian standards.
“Cruelty occurs in multiple parts of the chain: production (under-feeding or under-watering and tethering by the nose is widespread); marketing (loading, unloading and trucking with rudimentary facilities) and slaughter,” it says.
However, it is more likely to be reports of mistreatment of Australian animals in markets like Indonesia and Vietnam fuelling concern about China.
“All of those other markets in South East Asia are dominated by small individual private butchers - people with a couple of offsiders who buy one or two animals a day and slaughter them in city-owned plants,” Dr Waldron said.
“It is a fragmented system - domestic and imported cattle enter into those slaughter systems and then are sold on the wet market.”
Given the way large-scale importation of slaughter and feeder cattle into China will be organised, these cattle will enter modern supply chains in China, and not small-scale, fragmented chains.
“China has big, modern mechanised slaughterhouses that take ownership of the cattle.
“These plants may need 100,000 cattle a year and so the company buys the livestock.
“Therefore, because they are responsible for all aspects of slaughter they are much more able to control it.
“There are structures in place that allow for strict enforcement of ESCAS.
“The risk of leakage from the system will be much lower in China.”
Australian cattle will be required to be held in quarantine and sent to accredited large feedlots or abattoirs within 50 kilometres of where they arrive.
The report, commissioned by the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, outlined the 20-fold increase in beef volumes to China between 2011-12 and 2013-14.
It then points out the falls that have occurred since.
For example, during the first five months of this year, 28 per cent less was sent compared to the same period in 2015.
Australia’s ability to supply China had gone backwards, Professor James Laurenceson, deputy director of the UTS institute, said.
From trade policy breakthroughs to the Chinese investment in Australia’s beef industry, the report identifies where the potential is, what has been going wrong and discusses why the outlook is still fundamentally optimistic.
