RIYADH: The livestock ship Cormo Express lies anchored in Kuwait waters near the northern shipping port of Shuwaikh October 2, 2003. The ship was stuck for nearly a month off the coast of the United Arab Emirates with 57,000 sheep stranded aboard because of a dispute over the health of the sheep.
Wounded, because the Lebanese-born Australian citizen says all he wants to do is create more wealth for New Zealand farmers who receive much less for their sheep from the freezing works than if they were allowed to send them to the Middle East for slaughter.
Wary, because the media appears only to be interested in focusing on the negative, he complains on the phone from Sydney.
Told that New Zealand farmers are being paid $130 a head to send their sheep to Mexico for breeding, Assaf counters that his company would beat that price.
“Rest assured, our price would be over $200. It is all to benefit farmers, they will be the biggest beneficiaries out of this. It’s a cheap price, $130. At one stage we paid $160 for wethers that farmers don’t want any more,” Assaf says.
It is a notion that Federated Farmers president William Rolleston is comfortable with. Sending live sheep for slaughter to the Middle East offers farmers “more options” – with the proviso animal welfare would have to be assured, he says.
Rolleston says such high prices raise the question of why New Zealand marketers cannot achieve similar returns in Middle Eastern markets.
South Island farmers such as Mark Adams, hard pressed by drought, are receiving only $85 a head at the freezing works. The recent deal to send 45,000 ewe hoggets and 3200 beef heifers to Mexico – 1200 of which had been his – had “salvaged his position” he said.
Since the late 1980s, Assaf and his partner, Saudi multi-millionaire Hmood Alali Alkhalaf, have poured “millions of dollars” into Awassi (NZ) Holdings, and by 2003, had exported about 5 million sheep for slaughter.
“We’ve introduced just under $1 billion worth to the New Zealand economy, our company only. We used to take millions of sheep, 110,000 at once and they all got there safe and sound,” he said.
Alkhalaf is owner of the controversial farm in the Middle East where the Government has set up a so-called agribusiness hub at a cost of $11.5 million.
Miffed that his company could no longer export live sheep for slaughter, Alkhalaf had been portrayed by Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully as the roadblock to a free trade agreement with the Gulf states.
In southern Hawke’s Bay, Awassi Holdings own a farm where they are raising awassi sheep, a fat-tailed but lean breed highly prized in the Middle East – especially at the time of the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca.
