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FUELLING GOOD DECISION MAKING
Improve industry and market information
Fundamental to good business decision making is the provision of relevant and timely market information and the Australian livestock sector is no exception with at least 90 per cent of our market information recipients stating our market information services were ‘important’ to their business (Currie Communications, 2007).
Our National Livestock Reporting Service (NLRS) supplied 2,873 subscribers with regular market information via 153,400 emails (up 18 per cent on last year) and 27,000 faxes (slightly down on last year). In addition, we continued to attract visitors to the market news section on our website with 23,000 unique visitors a month last year – 15 per cent above our target of 20,000.
Underpinning our market information services are robust databases and this year we introduced new technology to minimise risk of data loss and improve data capture by field staff to ensure we stay at the fore front of livestock market reporting.
Monitoring and analysis of developments in Brazil and elsewhere in South America has been upgraded considerably over the past year in keeping with the dramatic changes to competition from this region. Similarly, monitoring and analysis of China production, trade and prices has been improved, as has the monitoring of competitive pricing of product in major and emerging markets. Regular monitoring and analysis was maintained for the US and New Zealand.
The MLA-SFE Cattle Futures Contract has had a disappointing year with a 52 per cent drop in trading – a result of the downturn in cattle lot feeding. However, MLA and the National Agricultural Commodities Marketing Association have launched the NACMA cattle trade rules, which is a new set of industry standard rules for forward cattle trading. These standard rules are aimed at creating transparency and consistency within the cattle contracting process and simplifying the process of dispute resolution, allowing for greater protection against defaulting parties on the purchase and/or sale of cattle. It has generated much interest with tracking survey results indicating approximately 55 per cent of the top 300 producers and 54 per cent of lot feeders surveyed were aware of the NACMA cattle trade rules.
