Local producers are now supplying deer antlers, ginseng and seahorses to the lucrative Asian medicinal market.
There's something strange happening down on the farm. New export industries are growing up around seahorses, ginseng, deer antlers and even cane toads.
Don't for a moment think our primary producers are going soft and turning on to New Age philosophy. Rather, there is increasing recognition that the Chinese medicinal market - while strange and stomach-churning to Western tastes - is serious business.
It's a case of high demand and skyrocketting prices in Asia that is stimulating the new ventures.
Wild Asian ginseng , the most spectacular example, sells for $US 120,000 ($186,050) a kilogram, while a bowl of fresh seahorse soup will set you back $US 300 ($460) in a Taiwanese restaurant. But to a Chinese population that has grown up with these products, they are daily essentials, part of a 2,000-year-old tradition that combines health benefits alongside myths of enhanced sexual performance.
While the new Australian industries are mostly small-scale, there is potential for enormous growth, say the producers leading the charge.
Last month Tasmanian company Seahorse Aquaculture exported its firstfrozen seahorses to Taiwan where they will be snapped up in the craze for seahorse soup.
But managing director Joffe Love says it is ried seahorses ($600 a kg) that are the mainstay of the trade. One million animals will be exported by June next year - a fraction of he 50 million seahorses consumed each year by Chinese people hroughout Asia, most of them dried, ground into powder and mixed in rinks or soup.
"It's a bit like going to bed with two panadols and a lemon juice," says Love. "For many Chinese they will always have a ried seahorse in the pantry."
In recent years, the wild seahorse population has declined dramatically due to over-exploitation in Asian waters, yet consumption continues to grow 10 per cent a year.
SSeahorse Aquaculture, based on the Taamar river near Launceston, is the first company in the world to successfully farm seahorses at a commercial level. It's taken five biologists three years to figure out how to overcome all the difficulties: to begin with, it is the male that carries the young in its stomach, and offspring numbers, compared to other fish, are low. But Love's team has exploited a high survival rate (96 per cent) to boost tank populations from 300 breeding pairs to 40,000 in six months.
Among the four seahorse species in Australian waters, the Pot-bellied variety is common in waters from Perth to southern NSW.
These mature so fast that they are ready for sale within 12 months, compared with four years for Asian seahorses. Love says Australia's clean, green image assists with marketing to Asian importers. "But on another level importers don't give a damn. Since seahorses retail between $1,500 and $10,000 a kilo, they just want them wherever they're from."
Over in the Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne, Fred and Charlene Horsman have begun this winter's harvest of 25 kilograms of wild ginseng from their Eucalypt forest. Of the two varieties of ginseng, wild Asian is the most lucrative at US$120,000 a kg, but the Horsman's focus on the American variety (A$1,500 a kg) that was first used by native Americans and is now widely marketed in Asia.
Not bad, considering that seven years ago the Victorian Department of Agriculture told Fred it was impossible to grow ginseng in the southern hemisphere.
The Horsman farm directly supplies the Singaporean retail chain Hockua Ginseng Enterprise, the "David Jones" of chinese medicinal shops in the city. The couple acknowledge their production is "just a drop in the bucket" but argue the potential is massive.
Ninety-five per cent of all ginseng grown worldwide is consumed in Asia either as a pick-me-up or to relieve stress. The United States exports 700 tonnes and it is estiimated China grows at least 10 times this amount. But Australlia's 300-plus ginseng farmers have the advantage of an offset season to northern hemisphere rivals. In October, when stocks are running low in Asia, our growers are ready to export.
The Horsmans believe Australian ginseng needs to be organic and wild-grown to capture the high-end market. "The real future of the ginseng market for Australian growers is in high-quality product that is exported overseas andcarefully marketed as organic and Australian," Charlene says.
(omitted)
BY: Peter O'malley
SOURCE: Australian Financial Review
1999.09.11
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