Australia ranked on animal welfare

Research, conducted by the CSIRO, is analysing the supply chain from farm, through transport to slaughter in importing countries to benchmark Australia against industry's best practice.

"The Australia industry probably cannot compete against a lot of countries in terms of price, but what we can compete against them in is the value statement and that statement reflects good health, good welfare and good quality product," CSIRO research scientist Alison Small said.

"Only by benchmarking and setting ourselves in a world ranking situation says that we are the best."

The research will analyse Australia's key competitors' best practice including France, UK, Africa, Canada, Saudi Arabia, US and South America.

The last live export benchmarking research was completed in 2006. Dr Small said the results would contribute to preventing disasters and loss of market by damaging Australia's trade reputation.

"In the past eight years a lot of things have changed and what we want to be sure of is are we still ahead of the game in best practice, is anyone else catching up and if someone is catching up, are they doing anything that we can implement to actual help us to move the goal posts and move ahead of the game?" she said.

"The Australia public expect us to be ahead of the game, if we drop back our standards, the countries who can produce and deliver animals much cheaper will take over our market niche."

Dr Small said the expanding middle-class populations in developing countries were now demanding value statements, "rather than just cheap protein on their shelves".

CSIRO hope to produce the draft document by December this year, with Meat & Livestock Australia and LiveCorp releasing the official report by March 2015. "There will always be people who believe we should not eat animals, people believe we should not transport animals, but to the general meat-eating public that want to know we are producing in a caring manner a high quality product, then it will make a difference to acceptance of the industry," Dr Small said.

"As a result we could see it generating increased demand as the message is out there that we are producing this high quality, high welfare product and customers internationally are more likely to uptake and choose our product over somebody else."

The research coincides with a pilot project, funded by MLA, being undertaken by Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne Rebecca Doyle that looks at the changes in animal handling following the delivery of MLA's Live Export Training Program to workers in foreign countries. Dr Doyle said data on the behaviour and physiology of animals during handling, behaviour of workers and their understanding of good animal welfare, will be collected before and after training.