Thailand's Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives has been working since June on a plan to ship live cattle to China by sea at 100,000 head a month, and a government update on 13 August described a public-private partnership with Chinese capital behind it, running through the privately owned deep-sea port of Bang Saphan in Prachuap Khiri Khan. At 1.2 million head a year the target is about one and a half times Australia's entire 2025 cattle export programme of 792,077 head.

Beef Central's South-East Asia correspondent is sceptical. Similar Chinese-financed proposals — quarantine zones in northern Laos, abattoirs in Xishuangbanna for Myanmar cattle — never ran at commercial scale; the China protocol is unfinished (the August update says China's customs administration has cut its list of outstanding veterinary questions to four) and nothing has shipped, so this is a plan, not a trade.

The hard part is aggregation. Roughly 1.38 million Thai households keep beef cattle, most fewer than 20 head, more than 90% of them indigenous or Brahman-cross; there is no feedlot sector that could fill a ship on one order. Sustaining 100,000 head a month means finding, testing and quarantining more than 3,300 export-specification animals every day, bought one small mob at a time across a country the size of France. Vietnam's Hoa Phat, which signed in August to take about 1,300 Thai Brahman slaughter cattle a month from December, is said to have staff in Thailand buying in dribs and drabs.

Prices are already moving: Thai slaughter steers have risen to $3.72 a kilogram liveweight from $3.55 in August, the strongest since May, and Malaysian and Vietnamese buyers report Thai cattle harder to find. If China did pull 1.2 million head out of Thailand, the first to go would be the cattle now trucked into Vietnam, Malaysia and Laos — which could push those buyers back to Australia, the only seaborne supplier of scale in reach.

The risk runs the other way too. Once Thailand has the protocols, quarantine capacity and port to ship cattle at volume, Indonesia — three-quarters of Australia's live cattle trade — becomes reachable; Indonesia has lived with foot-and-mouth since 2022 and already buys Indian buffalo meat from an endemic source. Even a tenth of the Thai target, 120,000 head a year, would be more cattle by sea than Australia sends anywhere but Indonesia, and would need close to 40 voyages a year from the same small pool of livestock carriers.

Elsewhere in the report: Vietnam took 2,859 Australian cattle in August after 2,635 in July — the first back-to-back months since the trade stalled, and the August lot were feeders, a commitment rather than a spot purchase — though the year to date is 7,508 head against 71,979 a year earlier; and Indonesia's food coordinating minister said on 14 August the government will seek a presidential regulation to import breeding stock from Europe, Brazil and Australia, even as every tonne of live cattle landed in Indonesia from January to July came from Australia.

Source: Beef Central