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Australia is in the final stages of agreeing to an 860- million-U.S.-dollar deal with China which could eventually involve the export of nearly 1 million Australian cattle each year.
Although the deal is yet to be officially announced, Australian government frontbencher Christopher Pyne revealed details about the agreement to Australian TV on Friday morning.
"It's a million cattle, worth 1 billion AUD," Education Minister Pyne told Channel Nine. "The ink is not dry on the contract, though.
"It's a great breakthrough. I mean, this is the kind of thing that happens when you have a government that's focused on economic outcomes.
"So we have a free trade agreement with Japan, free trade agreement with South Korea, and we're working on one with China."
However, it is understood that the agreement is not linked with free-trade negotiations between Australia and China that have been ongoing for more than nine years.
Agricultural complications, including China's longstanding ban on Australian live beef cattle export due to the presence of the bluetongue virus, have proved an obstacle in any such negotiations.
But the lucrative new deal was seen as a necessity to help China deal with recent beef shortages.
The agreement is now likely to be signed when Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Australia for the G20 meeting in Brisbane next week.
Australian officials have been in Beijing recently in an effort to push through free trade deals. However, despite this new agreement, Australian Agricultural Minister Barnaby Joyce doesn't believe it represents any significant progress.
"The tricks of dealing in Asia is you don't pre-empt their decision," Joyce said. "You let them make it and then you celebrate it.
"We have a massive up-swing from when we came to government to [where] we are now in the price of beef.
"We are also getting better prices for dairy. So we are not talking about an unviable industry, but an extremely viable industry.
"When I was in China, they made that abundantly clear to me that they want to purchase our soft commodities our beef, our sheep, anything, our goats."
Australia and China already have existing cattle deals in place, prior to this new agreement, with both dairy cattle and beef cattle exported to China last year for breeding purposes.
Now, cattle from southern Australia, which is known not to carry the feared bluetongue virus, will be shipped to China all year round. Meanwhile, cattle from northern Australia will be exported selectively, depending on the disease's presence.
However, due to availability problems and the aforementioned health protocols, Australia is not likely to be shipping 1 million cattle per year consistently to China for quite some time.
It is expected that Australia will initially export between 30, 000 and 50,000 cattle per year to China, with that number gradually increasing over time.
"The figure of a million head is a very optimistic one," the Australian Live Exporters Council Chief Executive Alison Penfold told ABC Radio on Friday. "I certainly don't think we'll see that in the foreseeable future."
