Beefy problem for Noumea’s Meat Board

Noumea’s Meat Board

From PAUL STERLING in Noumea

Noumea’s butchers have been muttering angrily for the last few weeks. To obtain the Cryovac-pack ed Scotch fillet imported from Australia or New Zealand, OCEF has been forcing them to take a high er proportion of local carcasses.

Meanwhile, the consumers, and in particular hotels and restaurants, are refusing to buy local production.

The tender, aged cuts from Australia and New Zealand are par ticularly popular with the barbecue fans.

Yet OCEF, Noumea’s Meat Board, is only applying the accepted policy of protecting local pro duction. While local supplies were insufficient, frozen carcasses were imported, but the latter were gra dually replaced by the refrigerated, matured meat as New Caledonia’s breeders stepped up production.

After a long and difficult meeting between cattlemen, butchers and

OCEF, a certain number of measures have been accepted. While imports of lamb and pork will re main at the same level, butchers will be forced to buy local carcasses of beef. Imports of Scotch fillet, a “Caledonian” dish if ever there was such a thing, will be reduced by 75% . Each butcher will receive one carton a week, while imports will drop from 25 to six tonnes a month.

But this is only a temporary measure. Local production is so high that an abattoir, abandoned when the OUACO canning plant closed down nearly 20 years ago, will be re-opened to slaughter cattle in the north and stock frozen beef.

OCEF will begin an advertising campaign to encourage the con sumption of stews and roasts instead of “steak and chips”.

The price of local beef is too high to permit exports to other Pacific Is lands, and the breeders in the New

Hebrides, particularly those on San to, will have a battle on their hands if they wish to continue exporting to New Caledonia.

There remains the possibility of canning meat and prohibiting im ports of canned and jellied beef, another measure which could have serious effects on the New Hebrides economy.

The OUACO canning plant, whose production was unanimously preferred to all imported preserves, closed down 20 years ago when local production became insuffi cient, and the danger is that, if and when the territory has its next nickel boom, present producers will drop

the stock-whip and rush back to the caterpillars the eternal cycle of an unstable economy.

Meanwhile, the people of New Caledonia have learnt with pleasure that an agreement had been reached between the French Government and INCO to prospect certain laterite deposits at Goro, on the southern tip of the mainland. The area granted to INCO is near the deposits earlier granted to two French companies, Societe Le Nickel and Aquitaine.

This will be the second program me of exploration carried out by INCO in New Caledonia. The first, undertaken eight years ago, had cost the company SAS million.