China lifts ban on five major Australian beef exporters

China has eased restrictions on Australian beef imports, with five major Australian meatworks now able to resume business with Beijing.

Transcript

00:00 This is great news for Australia's red meat industry. Learning overnight that Beijing

00:06 has lifted suspensions that applied to five Australian meatworks. They were all producing

00:11 beef in Queensland and northern New South Wales. And they'd all been locked out way

00:17 back at the beginning of the trade war. Of course, we're all so familiar with it now,

00:21 but the red meat industry along with barley were some of the first commodities to be hit

00:25 with trading suspensions. And this is certainly welcome news. Here's the Agriculture Minister,

00:32 Murray Watt, with a little more detail this morning.

00:36 That is fantastic news for Australia's cattle producers, for our meat processing industry,

00:41 for the workers in those industries, and of course for Australian exports. What we've

00:46 worked out is that even so far over the last few months with the different export bans

00:51 that have been lifted by China, that has worked out to $3 billion in extra exports for a

00:55 part of Australia. So the work that we've done to stabilise our relationship with China

01:00 is paying real dividends for our farmers, our processors.

01:04 We know that this is big business, Cath. What is the exact value of this to the Australian

01:07 economy?

01:08 Well, four of these five exporters actually represented about a third of the trade in

01:13 red meat exports to China at that time. And before these trade suspensions were imposed,

01:18 we were selling about close to $3 billion worth of red meat to China. Now, these exporters

01:23 have been able to sell their beef while locked out from China. They've been able to go to

01:27 different markets, but they certainly haven't seen the high prices for their commodities

01:32 that they were used to or had become accustomed to receiving from China. So it's really welcome

01:38 news for the red meat industry. And hopefully, Cath, there'll be some good news to follow

01:42 soon for the Australian lobster industry, which remains, I think, perhaps the only commodity

01:47 that's still locked out as a result of this trade war.

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