SYDNEY - With John Kelly’s rural Australian drawl, it is almost startling to hear him use Chinese cooking terms.
“The Chinese have a strong culinary tradition in using wild foods, not just meat, but a wide range of wild foods called yaemei in Cantonese and yewei in Mandarin,” said Mr. Kelly, executive director of the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia, a lobbying group. “Kangaroo will to a large extent just slot right into that existing tradition in much the same way it has in the European markets.”
Or so he hopes.
Soaring Chinese demand for other resources, like iron ore and coal, has helped to keep the Australian economy growing even through the worst of the global financial crisis.
Now, people like Mr. Kelly are hoping that Chinese demand can revive Australia’s kangaroo meat industry, which has been struggling since a food-safety import ban was imposed in 2009 by Russia .
Within Australia, kangaroo meat has always been a tough sell, either because the animal is a national symbol, whose slaughter animal rights activists oppose - or because of its gamey, pungent flesh.
The bigger opportunity has long been exports of meat from kangaroos, which are widely considered pests in the country’s parched hinterlands, blamed for problems like soil erosion and nighttime road accidents.
As recently as 2008, Australian kangaroo meat exports totaled 9,080 metric tons - worth $38.4 million, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Russia accounted for at least 58 percent of that market, until an E. coli outbreak linked to the meat in August 2009 led Moscow to ban the imports.
Australian kangaroo exports plummeted, to 2,650 metric tons in 2010.
Meat for human consumption makes up about 80 percent of total kangaroo exports, which also include meat for pet food and skins for clothing.
And so Mr. Kelly’s group is looking toward China, which last December sent a government delegation to Australia to investigate the health and sanitary conditions of kangaroo producers.
“We hopefully will see the Chinese people enjoy kangaroo meat very soon,” said Fang Xi, an economic official at the Chinese Embassy in Canberra .
Groups like the Australian Society for Kangaroos assert that besides being unfit for human consumption, the animals are in danger of being hunted to extinction.
But there are at least 25 million kangaroos living within commercial harvest areas - more than one for each of the 23 million people in Australia - which would seem to undermine claims of imminent extinction.
Mr. Kelly, meanwhile, fairly salivates at the prospect of shipping kangaroo to the kitchens of the world’s potentially biggest consumer market.
“I’d expect us to be putting product into China at some time this year,” he said, adding that he expected China “ to be a larger market than Russia ever was.”
By MATT SIEGEL
