CHINA has over the weekend added Teys Australia’s Naracoorte export beef processing facility in South Australia to its list of suspended suppliers.
The official Chinese regulatory notification did not provide a specific reason for the suspension, however Teys has confirmed the development.
Naracoote holds a frozen-only license for the China market.
The facility joins a list of eight other Australian beef and sheepmeat plants suspended from trade with China over the past five years – for reasons ranging from alleged documentation and regulatory inconsistencies to residue issues. Worldwide, there are now almost 150 meat processing and cold storage facilities suspended from trade with China.
Teys issued a brief statement saying it will work closely with the Australian export market regulatory bodies to achieve reinstatement of the facility’s access to China.
“Teys’ Naracoorte facility operates in full compliance with all state and federal, food safety, occupational health and safety and market access regulations, and continues to operate as normal,” the statement said.
The Naracoorte suspension is the first for an Australian red meat exporter since the Australian Country Choice plant in Brisbane was removed in October last year. The reasons provided to DAWE from Chinese authorities over that suspension related to frozen beef received in China that failed a random sampling test for chloramphenicol on product inspected at the entry port of Ningbo.
Prior to that, the Meramist plant north of Brisbane was suspended in December 2020, and the John Dee export plant near Warwick in Southern Queensland in August 2020 following a residue detection for an unusual antibiotic found during routine screening in imported meat.
None of the Australian export meat plants suspended so far by China have seen their trade access restored.
The Naracoorte beef plant earlier this month was subjected to COVID-related illness problems among staff, however these have now more or less passed. Chinese authorities last year expressed concerns that imported chilled and frozen food products (not just beef) might harbour coronavirus.
Australia’s chilled and frozen beef exports to China last year continued to soften, due to a range of political and regulatory factors.
Australia’s total beef trade with China last year totalled 148,357 tonnes, down about 25pc on the previous year, and a dramatic 51pc decline on the 2019 year, when the market accepted more than 300,000t of Australian beef.
find other buyers?
Sympathy for Teys on this occasion, as it takes it’s turn to get punished by the Asian bully boy. One could be forgiven for making a connection between this suspension and Australia’s support for the EU’s WTO case against China, but none of that speculation is of any assistance to Teys at the moment, which has to find a way back to reinstatement of its access. What is also of no assistance whatsoever is the prominent Australian political figures calling for Australia to “change its posture” towards China, and for Australia to focus on “diversifying our exports”, as though, in the case of the latter, Australia has never had that focus. How out of touch is that?
As for the former, changing our posture can only mean not standing up to economic coercion, and any politician advocating that is in the wrong job.
Hopefully Teys can find other markets for the frozen beef they send to China. I assume it being frozen gives them (Teys) a little more time and shelf life to find other markets for the meat.
One suspects that China is shooting themselves in the foot, as eventually they will want to reinstate all the banned meatworks, but they may find that no-one will sell them our wonderful clean/green product.