Australia: Africa's potential as a big beef customer on the US radar

Africa's massive population and increasing middle-to-upper income demographic is being eyed off by one of Australia's biggest beef competitors, the United States. For Australian exporters the prospects elsewhere stack up better but the long-term potential of the world's second most populous continent is still being noted. The US Meat Export Federation is pushing for market access attention in the region, saying there is some lucrative "low-hanging fruit to be had if we are able to get a bit of a break on the access side." USMEF president Dan Halstrom, in an interview on RFD-TV, said: "Rwanda, Nigera, Angola - these places remind me a lot of Mexico in the 1980s and what is Mexico today - one of our most reliable markets with almost a billion in sales of US meat. "So I don't think it will be too far in the future that some of these African places will take centre stage." He said with a population of 1.5b people and growth prospects of well over 2b in the near future, and increasing ...