It was with great interest and some rising of blood pressure as I looked at the meat export figures for February this year. Record beef shipments showed sharp increases to the US and South East Asia, mainly taking in Indonesia and Taiwan while volumes to Japan were similar to last year.
Our low dollar certainly made beef more affordable to the US, with shipments the largest since February 2002. The only major market to show a significant decline in February was Korea.
The thing that probably worries us all is that the flow on to beef producers has certainly been minimal.
I don’t know about any one else but as one of those beef producers I feel that we have been used as pawns in a very large game for which we get no economic benefit.