Australia’s fledgling camel industry has demanded the government stop wasting millions of dollars culling feral herds in the outback and focus instead on boosting meat exports to the Middle East.
That's fledgling camel industry as in a fledgling industry for camels, not an industry for fledgling camels. But back to the business in hand:
An estimated one million camels roam across a giant swathe of Australia’s barren interior, where they have become one of the continent’s most destructive invasive pests, tearing up vegetation, fouling ponds and streams as well as besieging remote townships in search of water.
In response, the authorities have ordered marksmen to kill two-thirds of the wild camel population in a five-year eradication programme.
Meat exporters, however, believe a more effective way to address Australia’s camel crisis is to export them as part of a carefully controlled business, rather than simply shoot them and leave their bodies to decompose in the desert.
“At the moment the camel industry in Australia is really struggling to become a commercial industry because of the lack of government support and the wasting of money in the culling of camels,” said Paddy McHugh, whose abattoir in Queensland ships camel cuts and milk to the Middle East, Malaysia and Thailand. “It is most disgusting and immoral, culling these camels. The answer is to develop a commercial industry,” he said.
“If they do cull 600,000 camels they would blow off the face of the Earth a billion dollars worth of exports for Australia that would be left to rot on the ground and cause disease. It is just disgraceful what is happening,” added Mr McHugh, whose company uses helicopters to corral feral herds before loading the prized catch onto trucks, and transporting them to a processing factory.
Mr McHugh said Australia’s mass slaughter of “some of the purest camels in the world” was derailing efforts to take advantage of untapped demand in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt.
But not everyone's convinced of the commercial viability of slaughtering for meat:
“Australia has a history of invasive animals doing very, very well here. People know about rabbits and foxes. There were no natural predators for camels in our outback. The climate is extremely suitable to them but the trouble is the native vegetation just doesn’t cope with the camels. They are doing enormous damage to the landscape,” explained Dr Tony Peacock, the chief executive of Australia’s Co-operative Research Centres Association.
Dr Peacock has doubts that harvesting wild herds could be financially viable when they were spread across such a vast, inaccessible area.
“Would people go six times across France to get a steak or to harvest a cow?
“You couldn’t do it economically with the cost of the fuel. The reality of accessing the camels that are literally in the middle of nowhere and slaughtering them with good welfare and food safety, then transporting that meat just becomes uneconomic in most cases,” Dr Peacock insisted.
It's not just the meat though::
“The top camel in the world is worth about AUD$8 million [Dh28m] for racing and the best beauty camel in the world is worth about $5m. In Australia they are worth a bullet in the head,” Mr McHugh said.
It fair makes you weep.
So, why don't Aussies start sticking a camel steak on the barbie themselves? Oh, they're getting there:
At the Adelaide restaurant Red Ochre Grill, a mixed platter of camel, wallaby, kangaroo and emu is a hit.
"It sells on the grill platter very well," said the executive chef, Ray Mauger. The meat was gamey in flavour but tougher than beef, he said.
