WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT

Fifteen years ago, many West Australians were up in arms about reports in this newspaper of a live sheep export shipment that went badly wrong.

I was among them. My column on these pages in October, 2003, described the Cormo Express as “a pitiful floating hellhole that has turned into a national embarrassment”.

What happened on the Awassi Express on its way from Fremantle to the Middle East in August last year — details of which have emerged only in the past week — shows little if anything has changed.

Vision released by Animals Australia depicts the disgusting conditions in which 2400 sheep of a consignment of 64,000 died from heat stress.

In the earlier Cormo Express disaster, 6000 of a shipment of 58,000 died after Saudi Arabia rejected them on trumped-up grounds and 30 countries refused to offload them.

The 2003 incident started AA’s investigations into the live export trade. This is a taste of that earlier column:

“After 72 days at sea — on a voyage that should have taken 16 — it is amazing that the ship is not up to the gunwales under the weight of its survivors’ excrement and urine. There’s a fitting mental picture for this debacle.

“The sheep have suffered excruciating temperatures and stifling humidity that has seen more than 10 per cent of them die from stress. To say sheep suffer extremes of temperature in Australian paddocks is to callously disregard the torment they have endured in the oppressive Persian Gulf conditions.”

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As a result of that debacle, the trade with Saudi Arabia was again suspended — but resumed two years later — and some measures were put in place to handle rejected shipments better.

But the underlying issues of sending animals on such long sea voyages in poor on-board conditions and exposed to searing temperatures in the Gulf’s hottest months continue.

As was pointed out here in 2003, none of this was new, even then:

“Successive Federal governments conspired to cover up the trade’s cruelty when death rates on the voyages were at their worst. Some very good investigative journalism by this newspaper through freedom of information laws and the courts unlocked some of that story in the mid-90s.

“But it was allowed to continue, even though a parliamentary committee in 1985 had recommended it be discontinued for its cruelty alone, apart from the effective loss of local abattoir jobs.”

And so now we are going through the charade again. Another Federal agriculture minister expresses outrage and calls for another inquiry which will probably lead to another temporary suspension.

Camera Icon Today it’s the Awassi Express, 15 years ago it was the Cormo Express. Credit: Illustration: Don Lindsay

Graham Daws’ company was involved in the Cormo Express shipment — which led to it being suspended for three months — and again this week he was defending the Awassi Express voyage as head of Emanuel Exports.

“Emanuel Exports has taken steps over more than six months to address the issues arising from our own extensive review of the voyage and the findings from the Federal Department of Agriculture and Water Resources investigation,” Daws said.

“This includes reduced stocking rates in summer up to 15 per cent beyond the Australian Standards for the Export of Livestock benchmark.”

Whatever the industry says to explain each incident and to attest that things are changing, the long history of the trade is that there is a pattern of animal abuse which doesn’t change. It just becomes worse in the hottest months.

Everyone who witnessed the hardship caused to cattle farmers from the Gillard government’s 2011 ban on live exports to Indonesia over another AA expose knows that hasty action is not the solution.

But a report for Animals Australia by Canberra-based Pegasus Economics suggests that phasing out the live sheep trade would not be the catastrophe for WA farmers that the rural lobby threatens.

Pegasus argues that the live sheep trade has been in decline since a high of about six million exports in 2002 to fewer than two million a year since 2014.

“Even in the case of WA specialist sheep farmers, the sale of sheep to the live export trade now only accounts for a relatively minor part of their enterprise,” the report notes.

“In the 10-year period from 2005-06 to 2015-16, sales of sheep by WA specialist sheep farmers only accounted for 19 per cent of total farm cash receipts on average.”

But the telling statistic was that sales by those farmers into the live export trade had declined to only 11.7 per cent of sheep sales by volume.

For WA’s mixed-enterprise farms, 70 per cent of their income came from grain and since 2011 less than five per cent from sheep.

“While the percentage of sheep sales to the live sheep export trade by WA mixed- enterprise sheep farms has fluctuated dramatically, it was only 10 per cent in 2015-16,” the report said.

If those figures are right, they do not demonstrate a significant impact on farmers if the live sheep trade was either phased out totally, or limited to months in which shipments could be done safely. Pegasus estimates WA farmers would lose about $9 million a year, 0.5 per cent of the income of specialist sheep producers and 0.17 per cent for mixed farmers.

The report found that the overall economic effect on WA of ending the trade would be marginally positive because of the effect on the abattoir industry which had sufficient spare capacity to absorb all the live sheep exported annually from WA.

However, what we have seen over the past 30 years should show us that a decision on the future of this trade cannot be made on economic grounds alone. I began that column back in 2003 with a quotation attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way in which its animals are treated.”

Those words remain as true today as they were 15 years ago when we were wrestling with this issue and as far back as Gandhi’s enlightened days.