Future is Bright for Oz on a Global Perspective
AUSTRALIA - The future for beef, and meat generally, is looking bullish. Global futures investors are beginning to speculate on a meat commodities boom as demand for meat pushes to unprecedented highs in countries such as China and Russia and supply shrinks in key producing nations.
5 June 2008
1 minute read
While they’re all signals that bode well for Australia’s beef industry, Meat and Livestock Australia’s chief market analyst Peter Weeks said that after years of sustained prosperity for cattle producers, the planets have fallen out of alignment – at least temporarily, reports Farm Online.
Farm Online say that while the US dollar has fallen, the Australian dollar has climbed, placing Aussie meat in a less favourable footing in the US, Japan and Korea – the three export markets that have powered the beef industry for the past five years.
At the same time, Korea, and very likely Japan, will fully reopen their doors to US beef in 2008, allowing US exporters to ride in on their weak dollar and quickly regain the ground they lost to Australia in the BSE scare of 2003.
Russia, South-East Asia and parts of Europe are picking up the slack, but haven’t yet fully accounted for the beef trade lost on the US, Japan and Korea.
Added to high grain prices in Australia, which have pushed numbers of cattle on feed down to 51 per cent of capacity and supressed the feeder animal market, and Mr Weeks expects prices for certain classes of cattle to fall in 2008-2009.
TheCattleSite News Desk
