Fresh food products with short lifespans, such as chilled lamb and beef, have particularly benefited from the growth of passenger traffic linked to the commencement of the Qantas Emirates partnership in 2013.

Twenty years ago, back in the days when we used to fly to Europe via Singapore, Perth airport moved 1.9 million international passengers. This number grew to 4.1 million a decade later which dramatically increased air freight capacity to the Middle East and Asia.

At the bottom of all those outgoing planes is spare cargo space or what they call belly cargo which we can fill with rock lobster going to China and chilled lamb and beef going to the Middle East.

Both regions with a solid percentage of high net wealth consumers who will pay an absolute premium for fresh product, but, like the market for luxury cars, it is limited in size.

Produce too much as rock lobster as we did pre-2008, and you flood the market and the product ends up frozen in a container wandering the world looking for a home.  Produce too much lamb and it ends up as mutton hopefully wandering onto a ship to enter the live export trade but if that trade is not there it ends up like frozen lobster in a container looking for a market.

Even when we have our volumes matching the market we need to have those planes landing daily for if we don’t keep up a consistent supply, then our product gets replaced by another producer such as New Zealand or South African who can both supply meat and lobster.  

The failure to return to pre-COVID levels of international flights has impacted our high-end export sectors, hence the recent decision to stop Qatar doubling its flights is going to hurt our fresh produce export industry.

Any opportunity to increase capacity should be embraced by the Federal Government particularly when the sale yard of lamb has fallen 50 per cent since this Federal government came to power.

Qatar is the third largest market in the Middle East and North Africa for Australian chilled and frozen boxed beef and sheep meat.

Following the Emirates/ Qantas flights into the UAE, Doha, the capital of Qatar, is the next logical airport to see increased flights into the Middle East.

Which makes the government’s mad decision to not approve additional Qatar airlines flights beyond belief, particularly for a government that is claiming that the live sheep industry can simply transition from walking on a ship to being loaded into a container as boxed fresh, chilled, or frozen.

Remove the high value live export market and cap the fresh airfreight market and we are left with the frozen market which pays half the amount of the other two. Just ask the lobster industry what they get paid for frozen vs live lobster.

When you are a high cost producer, the only way you can make money is to target the high paying premium markets, but to do that you can’t afford to have limitations on your means of shipping.

As an example of the air freight capacity shortage, pre-COVID, V and V Walsh, now part of the Craig Mostyn Group, one of the State’s three large sheep processors, were moving 7000 lamb carcases per week via airfreight, but today it is down to 750 – 1000 a week. 

Not only is capacity short but costs have gone up, in part due to the lack of air freight competition out of Perth, with costs to the Middle East 90c – $1 kg more than out of Melbourne.

Total capacity to the Middle East and North African countries (MENA) for sheep meat exports is down from about 160 tonnes per day in 2018 pre-COVID to 66 tonnes as at April 2023, all linked to a lack of airfreight capacity.

This means there remains extensive untapped market potential of 100 tonnes per day, which is equivalent to 3000 lambs a week or around a million a year. Every one of those lambs that doesn’t make it onto a plane either ends up as frozen on a ship or as mutton hoping to catch one of the last ships out before the government shuts the live trade down.

The stupidity of both the Qatar and the live export decision knows no bounds. 

Right around Australia, spare airline capacity remains a significant issue for expansion.  Sydney accounts for almost half of international air cargo by weight, but Perth has the highest dollar value as a result of both its lobster and meat freight and, believe it or not, gold coins.  Interestingly, our biggest imports are pharmaceutical and electronic products – think of all those Amazon and Alibaba purchases that arrive in a week.  

But, you may ask, what about hiring a dedicated air freighter aircraft?

Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane are currently the only airports in Australia with markets large enough to sustain dedicated international freight services, except for one weekly service to Toowoomba. 

This leaves Perth totally reliant on spare belly capacity on international flights.

Currently Perth airport handles around 1000 tonnes a week of export airfreight with 80 per cent of the total fresh produce, but total airfreight movement remains well below pre-pandemic levels.

In 2022, total airfreight volumes were 17 per cent lower than 2019. Outbound (exporting) traffic is particularly low – as of March 2023 (latest data release), 12-month total freight was at the lowest since 2015.

Nationally, Sydney handled over half of all of Australia’s airfreight, but it is cost prohibitive to tranship from Perth back to Sydney then off to the Middle East, so the focus needs to be on increasing international freight out of Perth. 

In 2019, which I’d choose as the most recent ‘normal’ year, the average inbound Qatar airways flight to Australia contained 7.32 tonnes of freight, and the average outbound flight from Australia contained 12.56 tonnes of freight. These numbers have been consistent over the past decade, so they work as a rough guide to extra freight capacity per flight added.

One interesting little factoid is that aircraft type and model really matter.

The single deck 777 in full 300 passenger configuration can carry 23,000kg, 132m3 of cargo in addition to a full passenger and baggage load, about twice the air cargo as the long distance version of the double decker A380, also in passenger configuration.

In Perth at the moment, we are served by two nightly A380s (one Emirates and one Qatar Airways) – you know the big double decker planes that were once on their way out as being too big. 

If the Middle East airlines were able to add more flights to Perth, they would likely shift from their A380s to more frequent and lower passenger number 777 flights with a consequence of doubling the airfreight capacity on each and every flight.

But even if, or rather when, the Government reverses its decision and allows Qatar to double its current capped 28 direct return flights in and out of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth, this would add just an estimated additional 1,103 tonnes of outbound capacity per month nationally.

Double the flights to four out of Perth is likely to see them drop down to the single deck 777 which could see air freight capacity increasing  fourfold, but this is only an additional 100t a week.  

Problem is this only socks up 3000 lambs a week, nowhere near enough to save the industry from the looming disaster of shutting off the live export trade which is the ultimate fallback option when we can’t move our lambs through the system.

If the government is banking on boxed sheep meat replacing live exports, then its decision on Qatar is a step backwards.

But even when they reverse it, the additional air freight isn’t going to make the slightest difference to the price of sheep in the sale yards, not that the animal activists or the Labor Party give a rat’s.

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