Australia's most important Middle East livestock export market, Saudi Arabia, will not be ESCAS compliant by the due date on the first of September.
That assessment comes from John Edwards, the Chairman of the WA Livestock Expoters Association.
ESCAS is the Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System, which was put in place by the Australian Government to improve animal welfare safeguards for the livestock export trade.
The ESCAS compliant deadline for Middle East markets Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman, United Arab Emirates and Israel is the first of September, and that's the same cut off date for South East Asian markets Singapore, Malaysia, the Phillipines and Japan.
But it's the Middle East markets that are pivotal for the future of Australia's live trade.
"History shows that it's been one of our largest sheep and cattle markets in the past and exporters are certainly hopeful that this can be the case moving forward. It's certainly the largest land mass of any of the countries that we work with in the Middle East ... and has the largest demand for sheep, sheep meats and beef out of any of our Middle East markets."
"If you wrap all that up along with the fact that theyre' prepared to take a whole variety of sheep types from wethers to cross bred lambs as well as the exotic breeds along with a very strong preference for bulls of any Bos Indicus breed obviously they are pretty good insights to what potential the market offers going forward."
"Saudi Arabia has and we recognise that it presents additional challenges to affecting supply chain management and the ESCAS principal over and above those encounted with the tranche one markets that we all remember were implemented back in March of this year mainly because out of all Middle East markets Saudi's the most complex and multi layer I guess in its live animal selling and distribution systems and these were really impacted on heavily by ESCAS and the volumes of animals that can be sold in the market place under the ESCAS regime and this was a point that was raised very early on in industry to government working group discusions back late last year in our efforts to highlight that one supply chain assurance model doesn't necessarily fit all markets."
John Edwards is hopeful the Saudi market will be ESCAS compliant by early 2013.