Today (16th August), an item was posted on the Australian ABC web-site titled ‘Pastoralist says ESCAS animal welfare red tape will turn markets away from Australia’.
‘… A WA [Western Australia] pastoralist believes Australia’s new animal welfare regulations are more detrimental to the live export trade than any campaign waged against the industry by animal rights groups.
Lang Coppin is a pastoralist from Yarrie Station, not far farm Marble Bar in the Pilbara and he’s also the WA Farmers Federation’s representative on the Cattle Council of Australia.
He says the rules, regulations and paperwork associated with the Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System, or ESCAS, will encourage markets to look elsewhere for their livestock.
Lang Coppin says our traditional markets will probably put ESCAS in the too hard basket.
“You know the live export job is probably going to wither on the vine quicker with all the rules and regulations that the exporters have got to go through and the importing country is going to slow it down quicker than all the mob out there that want to stop it.”
“They’re probably all everyday with all the news of different things, the problems and countries that are rejecting orders and trying to source stock from other countries they’re probably drinking champagne in fact they’re probably perpetually pissed at the moment.”
“We’re not trying to water down anything to do with the animal welfare part of itself but the compliance and the auditing and all that sort of thing is very expensive, it’s very hard to force all these new regulations on other countries that have been our traditional clients for years they’re just saying no bugger this it’s all too hard we’ll see if we can get our stock from another country where we don’t have to go through all the auditing.”
“For instance say a country that takes 300, 000 head of cattle a year from us where it might have been half a dozen bits of paperwork it now involves 100,000 bits of paper.”
He says he’s not sure about the future of his Yarrie station in the Pilbara.
“We’ve got a lot of pretty hills there, might go into tourism or something I don’t know. Where our location is there’s always, we can still breed the type of cattle that we can get into the southern markets.”
“Look I don’t think the live export thing is going to dry up, shut down completely I think the ones that are up and running now are probably, will continue, but it’s halving some of the orders, so it’s pretty tough for the people that are 100 per cent live export … economically it’s not looking too flash for them.” …’
Read the item at www.abc.net.au/rural/wa/content/2012/08/s3569533.htm
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Posted on August 16, 2012
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