The Australian Beef Association believes the ACCC and politicians are wrong about complexity in the meat supply chain. It says this is why politicians continue to neglect the supermarket meat issues.
In what it believes to be a first, the ABA have posted on their web site a power point presentation to give an insight into the cost of a live beast at the farm gate to meat on retail shelves.
See what you think? And leave a comment below.
Huge Beef Consumption Decrease With No Light In Sight!
July 2010 MLA forecasts over the next 5 years beef consumption is expected to fall 15% from 34 kilograms to 28.9 kg while lamb and pork consumption will remain steady. Annual chicken consumption is expected to increase 9.7% from 38 kilograms a person to 41.7 kilograms.
This is despite MLA spending $700 million of producers taxes on R&D since its inception in 1989.
Hard to believe the MLA’s new $5million ad campaign will solve this challenge.
Producers Present Alternative Beef Industry Plan
A major producer meeting says a meat quality grading system like that in the USA should be introduced that grades carcasses rather than cuts of beef. It said this would help capture more of the domestic market beef for grading (and thus add value and revenue to producers), while a restructure of MLA and research and development bodies was planned to reduce costs and duplication. It claims MLA’s existing MSA QA system has been around for years without any significant uptake or consumer affect, and that most R&D funds allocated by MLA benefit individual applicants rather than the Industry in general.
Read more here
Labour, Liberal Coalition Or Gasp! Shock Horror…Green?
Apparently Minister Burke has snubbed the Australian Beef Association and the various producer forums regarding concerns about issues vital to the industry such as a lack of democracy and general producer input.
The Liberal Coalition Opposition would also have to change significantly to provide any benefit here too! It was Deputy PM Anderson who over-saw the implementation of MLA and its associated lack of transparent democracy and subsequent Minister Truss, MP Heffernan and former stock agent Joyce similarly didn’t provide much joy either while in power.
So what are we to do? Perhaps a left-field option could be to get on the Green bandwagon and participate in the balance-of-power through a deal with Bob Brown where Land rights and care for the land by producers are recognised, coal mining on valuable farm land is cast away in favour of sustainable food production and producers are given a democratic vote on the direction of their industry that is not watered-down by processor votes (just like dock workers and construction workers)? Wonder whether we could throw-in the massive NLIS waste as well?
What do you think?
Please leave your comments below.
Question: If someone can be crippled from eating bad hamburger meat (where most of Australia’s exports to the US end-up), should she be able to locate the livestock from whence it originated? And if so, is this possible?
New York Times article
The long and the short of this article is that after being crippled by the E.coli from eating minced meat from the food giant, Cargill, this poor girl attempted to back-track the meat’s pathway. The meat was manufactured from a plethora of ground-up rubbish including some cattle meat and marketed as “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties”. However, because it originated from a variety of animals and by-products, processed by a variety of personnel there was no hope of tracking-down the originating beasts or their ‘home’ properties. (The side issue here is that the ingredients were listed only as “beef”).
The reality is that a cattle ID system such as NLIS or LPA would not and could not have assisted this victim or others following in her eating ‘footsteps’? Perhaps this is one of the reasons America and Japan don’t have a livestock ID system. If they don’t, then how can MLA justify Australian producers paying their levy taxes to fund one here?!
Please leave your comment below.
Agforce is right to advise consumers that they are headed for even higher costs if the fuel rebate is scrapped. Agforce on fuel costs
However, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place, aren’t they as we should be more focussed on the current rip-off by processors and retailers. Australia’s meat is purchased at the lowest cost in the developed World and sold at the highest! Click for the facts
While it’s all very well for MLA to advertise to increase consumption, I would prefer they work on removing the rip-off. It must be difficult for them though when they are representing both producers and the processors ripping them off!
What do you think?
Please leave your comment below.
Wool buyers aren’t able to sell mulesed wool to fabric suppliers of large garment makers because consumers just won’t buy such product. This could be considered as a type of QA requirement on wool producers. In fact, it is probably the most potent direct QA requirement we have seen.
For more see this article or the previous Rural Australia mulesing article.
At first glance, this type of wool QA might seem to be relevant to the MSA and LPA QA contraints MLA has attempted to foist on meat producers for so many years. However, anti-mulesing is being actively promoted by consumers whereas meat QA is not being activately sought by consumers.
After many years of MLA promotion only about 4.8% of meat killed in 2007 was MSA.(If around 600,000 head are MSA and the total market kill is currently around 13million – The Weekly Times Nov 3, 2008) This leaves around 95% non-MSA. So, the vast majority of meat being consumed is non-MSA.
In fact, MLA recently stated (The Weekly Times Nov 3, 2008) that Australian meat exports are expected to hold-up because of the strong $US dollar. Where does MSA fit here? Probably in the same dark place as NLIS i.e. No country except Australia even talking about it now – despite MLA’s best efforts to promote it internationally (using producer funds, of course!)
Cattle Care and Flock Care failed and Victorians have led the pack in just jacking-up and saying “No” to MSA totally, apparently!
These figures show that in reality, QA is actually wasting valuable producer funds. If consumers want it, don’t worry, like mulesing, they’ll let us know.
CAAB is happily extending its MSA-backed (and presumably MLA sponsored) program and good luck to it. However, it is a niche branded product that doesn’t supply even a lion cub’s share of the market, let alone a lion’s share! If groups like CAAB require MSA then those producers wishing to participate are free to do so. We need to support enterprises like CAAB, however, it’s just not fair that those producers not wishing to do supply to CAAB should have to pay MLA to manage MSA systems for niche brands like CAAB.
LPA is the last QA vestige left for MLA (and its cohort processors) and it only surives because it (illegally?)forces producers to pay MLA to use an NVD form they had already been using from a different source for several years anyway.
So, is mulesing QA analagous to that for meat? I don’t think so!
What do you think?
Please leave your comment below?
Did you know that a bloke called David Thomasen, “…sits at the helm of a $16 billion business whose marketing successes have a positive effect on the turnover of two of Australia’s top companies, Woolworths and Coles?” click for the article on MLA advertising. No, he’s not the CEO of the World’s largest farming conglomerate, he’s the MLA’s (Meat & Livestock Australia) advertising man! And he’s in charge of an advertising budget – a far cry from being at the ‘Helm’, wouldn’t you say! In response to his claim, not only does meat advertising have a positive effect on the turnover of these two virtual monopolists, but it also enables to them to continue to fleece Australia’s farmers! How else could farm gate prices decrease when retail prices increase?
*IF* MLA’s advertising has been so good over so many years, where’s the measurable effect on the producer’s bottom line?! Any decent marketer knows that it’s one thing to generate sales, it’s another to manage earnings and MLA needs to be brought to account for the earnings of its funding producers!)What do you think? Please leave a comment below
at risk meat into Australia from the US.Isn’t this a classic case of letting the horse bolt and then trying to re-stable it?!You’d reckon McGauran et al, including AQIS, would want to learn as quickly as possible and shore-up our defences to prevent this sort of thing happening again to our precious livestock. And you’d think they’d be even more vigilant when it comes to our massive meat livestock market. We are 2nd only to Brazil in beef exports but are allowing meat at risk of foot and mouth into Australia from the US and Brazil. It will be a sad day if (when?) some exotic disease devestates our meat industry because some poilticians wanted to “Go All The Way With LBJ”!Hah! Not likely! Retail prices are up again but the Nat’s have found more excuses for prices not being pased through to producers!
Wouldn’t it be nice if the Nat’s Senators Boswell, Anderson, McGauran and Vaille actually stood for something in favour of their farming constituency. Instead all they seem to do is kowtow to the Libs and ‘bag’ Labor.
Labor seems to at least be interested in the fact that grocery prices are increasing. (The CPI was 1.4% this quarter alone i.e. 5.6% on an annual basis! Do your meat prices relfect this?) . It wants to investigate supermarket pricing because farmers aren’t getting such increases.
Senator Boswell however, says that, “The only way to bring prices down is to encourage more competition and independent operators in the grocery sector, and for Australian shoppers to change their habits to support them.” Fat chance, mate! He says, “… we live in a free country where people are allowed to buy what they choose from whom they choose to buy it, at a price they are prepared to pay.”
Sounds good in theory, but with our largest processor (AMH) owned by our largest competitor (Brazil) and the two largest retailers owning 70% of the market, it might be time to listen to someone who might be interested in helping us and not just propping-up the Big end of Town.
What do you think? (Please leave a comment below).
Planting a tree gains a car buyer carbon offsets in the USA.
Does it follow that car companies might buy-up plantations as investments to counter-act their polluting ways? (Not that it actually decreases pollution, of course!)
If John Howard can envisage this scenario, why can’t he envisage Australia’s farmers getting in on the Carbon-trading act? Farmers are responsible for vegetation management on a scale that can only be dreamt of in cities and towns. Farm vegetation has the added and no less important effects of protecting and improving soil quality, salinity control, pasture improvement and livestock production. This would suggest that perhaps farm vegetation should be worth more to the environment than island-like plantations resulting in desert wastelands at the end of their time.
Three questions must be asked:
1. Would the large plantation groups be less valuable to this argument if farmers were included in Carbon credit schemes. i.e. Is there silent lobbying of the PM from this area?
2. Are the vegetation management efforts of Australian farmers important to Australians?
3. Are Australian farmers becoming less relevant to Conservative governments because of their diminished voting capacities?
What do you think? (Have your say below – if you think it, it’s worth writing it!)
MLA should never print the words “high cattle prices” in reference to Australian cattle prices.
Whilst cattle prices are higher than previously, they are also lower than previously and certainly not at an historical high.
On a world stage however, Australian cattle prices are low.
The EYCI sits at 339, around $1.86 per kg live
US feeder prices are around 86.5 US/lb which is A$2.53 live, US prices are 36% higher.
In Japan, B2 carcasses are at just under $11 per kg and the A5 Wagyu carcass is at just over A$23 per kg equating to $4000 per head for dairy steers and $10,000 per head for high end Wagyu.
Australian cattle prices are certainly not high on a world stage.
The 2 decades of deflation in Japan have resulted in an expectation that prices will continue to come down.
Using high to describe Australian cattle prices in print merely reinforces this expectation with beef.
(This was sent to MLA by a producer in response to a statement in the MLA weekly publication, “Friday Weekly”).
What do you think?
(Please leave a response below)
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