Freight turmoil hitting red meat exports in Australia

In an increasingly competitive world, Australia has some innate advantages in delivering high quality red meat protein to global markets: it is in the right neighbourhood to access growing demand in the Asia Pacific and world-leading shelf-life performance underpins an expanding chilled trade. As such, Australia is the second largest exporter of chilled beef (the US is number one but is advantaged by its land border with Canada and Mexico) and the biggest exporter of chilled sheepmeat. However, global shipping and air-freight have been in turmoil over the last year. Consumer demand for goods has vastly exceeded expectations, most notably in the US, and supply chains have grappled with relentless disruptions from COVID-19. With relatively inelastic global shipping capacity, container shortages have been exacerbated, freight rates have skyrocketed (particularly on Asia-US and Asia-Europe routes but also ex-Australia) and bottlenecks have emerged at major ports across the world. This ...