About 2000 people in Jakarta seem to give a cow about live cattle exports according to this report on the ABC website, which I was interested in given my earlier blog posts.  Apparently:

About 2,000 people have protested outside Indonesian government offices in Jakarta over the continuing restriction of live cattle imports from Australia.

So who are these people and what can we learn about the impact of Australian and now Indonesian live cattle export/import restrictions?  The ABC claims the protest was organised by the “Indonesian Beef Committee”, who, after a bit of googling and google translating, seem to be the same as the “Jakarta Raya Beef Committee” whose chairman is associated with the “Indonesian Indigenous Entrepreneurs Association“.  Neither group seems to have an English or Bahasa Indonesia website, but according to Beef Central, they’re a group of meat importers.  So meat importers protesting about meat importing restrictions.  Wow. And 2,000 of them.  That might seem like a lot until you read this Reuters article on rent-a-crowds in Indonesian politics and how easily and cheaply they can be arranged.

The Beef Central article points out one of my earlier points that:

The policy [to restrict imports] and the shortage of meat it has created has forced cattle prices up which has pleased local farmers

Of course it has.  The big winners from the restrictions are Indonesian farmers, many of whom are very poor and whom the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research has spent a considerable amount of Australian money trying to help over the years.  The losers are Australian cattle farmers and Indonesian importers, who are all having their say.  City-dwelling, probably middle class, beef-eating Indonesians also lose, but with plenty of substitutes they seem not to have noticed yet (or at least I haven’t noticed they’ve noticed through the English-language media).

The human winners and losers seem predictable enough, but I wonder how the cows are faring? Remember all this began out of concern for animal welfare?  Improving practices in Indonesian abattoirs has to be a good thing, but does reduced live transport of animals result in animal welfare improvement?  If it results in more local cattle being raised by Indonesian smallholders, who benefit in many ways from livestock ownership and who have an interest in the welfare of the animal, then I would say yes.  If the result is the expansion of feedlot farming in Indonesia, where animals spend their entire lives in small pens eating grains they aren’t evolved to digest, rather than most of their lives on Australian rangeland, followed by a few months in feedlots, then I think the answer is no.  Certainly the human and animal welfare implications of these restrictions are more complicated than are reported by the predictable interest groups.

I’d welcome feedback on this:

• are Australian animal welfare groups working with the Indonesian beef industry and groups like ACIAR?
• Does anyone disagree that reducing live exports only to increase “factory farming” in Indo is an animal welfare loss?
• Have smallholders really experienced a gain from the Indonesian beef price rise, or is it captured by more commercial, larger scale operators?
• Are Indonesian beef eaters genuinely outraged and I just haven’t read about it?
• Should this inner-city living sporadic beef eater just shut up and butt out?