In a comment piece for Beef Central, James Nason argues that Australia's cattle industry may be under-funding the body that speaks for it, and points to what happened at the Woolworths annual general meeting in Sydney this week.
There, environmental activists took turns at the microphone to describe the beef industry as environmentally destructive, part of a growing practice of using company AGMs to press retailers over what campaigners call "illegal deforestation" linked to beef. Adam Coffey, a Central Queensland producer and deputy chair of Cattle Australia, also spoke: he thanked Woolworths for working with the industry and drew a line between deforestation and the routine vegetation management that keeps farmland productive. To do it, he had to leave his own farm and family business and travel to Sydney.
Nason sets the numbers side by side. Australia's grassfed cattle industry produces about $25 billion a year, yet Cattle Australia runs on an annual budget of around $2.5 million. Greenpeace Australia Pacific, the Australian Conservation Foundation and The Wilderness Society have reported budgets of $30 million, $18 million and $11 million, and the Minerals Council of Australia about $30 million. He accepts these are not like-for-like comparisons, but says they raise fair questions.
Producers already pay a $5 a head transaction levy on cattle sales, used mainly for marketing and research, and some say that is enough. Nason replies that a large collective levy does not by itself mean the representative body is properly funded, and that the current levy review is the moment to look at it.
He recalls Cattle Australia chair Garry Edwards telling the CattleConnect conference that volunteerism built the industry but is now a weakness. "It's not amateur hour in this industry anymore," Edwards said.
Not every reader agreed: one commenter under the piece wrote that Cattle Australia already draws funds from Meat & Livestock Australia and should persuade producers to fund it rather than seek a share of the compulsory levy.
Photo: CSIRO / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
Source: Beef Central
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