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Camel-Meat Exports Aim to Turn Pest Into Profit
As populations and food needs grow across the Middle East, one Egyptian businessman has spotted a niche export opportunity for Australia: camel meat.
Magdy el Ashram, who has spent the past two years in Australia, is reaching the final stages of a plan that he believes could both feed a hungry region and resolve one of Australia's biggest feral-animal problems. Mr. Ashram last week applied to the government of the South Australian town of Port Pirie for permission to build a plant to slaughter up to 100,000 camels annually. It would be the first industrial-scale attempt to process the meat in Australia in accordance with halal dietary laws that make it suitable for Muslims to eat.
"Maybe camels are a problem for Australia, but there's a need for the meat somewhere else," Mr. Ashram said. "If someone is going to process it, he's solving the problems for the government and solving the problem for the people who want to eat it."
Camels, prized in the Middle East for their fat-rich milk and lean meat as well as a means of transport, are a pest in Australia, blamed for devastating wilderness and farmland. Introduced in the first half of the 19th century as pack animals to help open up the country's vast interior to European settlers, they now roam in numbers that exceed a million, the government estimates—about 10% of the world total. Facing forecasts that if left unchecked the population could double in the next decade, the federal authorities in 2009 set up a four-year, 19 million Australian dollar (US$20 million) project to cull the animals.
In Mr. Ashram's vision, cuts of camel will join kangaroo steaks and crocodile fillets in a small but growing niche at the exotic-meat end of Australia's A$30 billion agricultural export industry. The country annually exports about 14,000 tons of kangaroo meat, worth an estimated A$27 million.
"The project stacks up on virtually every front and I will take a hands-on role in ensuring its success," said Michael O'Brien, minister for agriculture & fisheries of the state of South Australia, who describes feral camels as an environmental menace in his state, which is bigger than Texas but has a population of just two million people. He said he'll lobby intensely for the project.
Previous attempts to export the meat in any significant quantities have been stymied by the challenge of arranging a steady supply of the wild camels, which roam freely across vast areas of Australia's outback, making them difficult to track, even with the help of helicopter. Peter Seidel, a 20-year camel exporter and former chief executive of the Central Australian Camel Industry Association, said Mr. Ashram faces a "daunting" task gathering enough animals.
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