AUSTRALIA: feeder steers Darwin $4.10 

The headline number is the Darwin feeder price, which has come off the $4.50 highs of February and March to sit closer to $4.10kg liveweight. That is around a 9 percent fall – fairly typical for this time of year as supplies come on but still a welcome relief to our trading partners. 

Several vessels have loaded out of Broome over the past month through the Kimberley Marine Support Base floating wharf, which opened last October and is now becoming part of the regular dispatch picture. The Broome route saves close to two days of sailing time on the Indonesia run compared with Darwin, and the 24/7 tide-independent loading is doing what was advertised. 

The other piece in the freight picture is bunker fuel, where the volatility this year has been more notable than the level. Singapore bunker pricing peaked at around USD1100/mt in early March on the Iran conflict spike, fell back to USD690/mt by mid-April, and has since rebounded to around USD850/mt. That compares with about USD480 at the start of the year, 

so even after the partial unwind the net effect is still a meaningful cost increase that flows through to CIF prices as charters roll over. On the short Darwin to Indonesia leg the USD exposure is less than longer voyages to say, Vietnam, but it is one more pressure point sitting on top of feedlot margins that were already paper-thin. 

INDONESIA: slaughter steers $4.94kg live weight (IDR 12,600 = $1 AUD) 

Indonesian cattle prices continue to firm despite the easing in Darwin. Lampung slaughter steers are now around IDR 62,000kg ($4.94), with Java steers a touch higher around IDR 64,500 ($5.12). The retail picture has not improved either. Wet market beef knuckle is still running at around IDR 145,000kg ($11.51), with supermarket knuckle near IDR 160,000 ($12.70). Chicken sits around IDR 38,000kg ($3.02), and the gap against beef just keeps widening. The chicken price holds because Indonesia’s poultry industry has structural advantages that beef cannot match. Production is largely domestic, cycle times are measured in weeks rather than months, and feed conversion is roughly four times more efficient than for cattle. Beef is tied to imported Australian cattle, a rupiah-denominated price ceiling and a long, capital-intensive supply chain. 

It is worth a step back to talk about something structural in the Indonesian system. Cassava is a common major input in Indonesian feedlot rations, in two forms. Gaplek is peeled and sun-dried cassava root sliced into chips. Onggok is the fibrous pulp left behind once tapioca starch has been extracted at processing factories. It plays a similar role to corn in American feedyards. Fresh cassava is highly perishable and carries naturally occurring cyanide, so roots are dug, peeled, sliced and dried on concrete pads or compacted soil, with the drying step also breaking the cyanide down. At around 85 percent starch and energy-dense, gaplek typically sits at 20-40 percent of feedlot concentrate rations, balanced against palm kernel meal, copra and soybean meal for protein and rice straw or king grass for fibre. 

Indonesia is the world’s third largest cassava producer, with around one million hectares of it, mostly in 

Lampung in south Sumatra and across central Java where the biggest feedlots also happen to sit. The reason it is worth talking about now is that feed input costs have been creeping higher for the past 18 months. Cassava prices have risen as plantings shift to higher-value crops, and feedlotters now have to plan months ahead, buying in volume when seasonal supply is up and storing it through the lean part of the year. 

The political fight over the 2026 beef import quotas has come back into the open. Teguh Boediyana, executive director of the Indonesian Meat Producers and Processors Association, is publicly pushing for the private quota to be restored from 30,000 tonnes to around 180,000 tonnes, the level allocated in 2025, arguing the settings are slowing business expansion and putting jobs at risk. Whether anything shifts is another matter. The 2026 structure was signed off with political backing from the top, including the Brazilian quota, which followed President Lula’s Jakarta visit last year, and Jakarta has little appetite for reversing it. For Australian exporters this is a boxed beef issue rather than a live cattle one, but restoration of private quota space is the only realistic way for our chilled product to compete in modern retail and food service. 

VIETNAM: slaughter Steers $4.86kg live weight (VND 19,100 = $1 AUD) 

Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Environment has formally proposed to the Prime Minister that emergency approval be granted for the import of SAT-1 foot-and-mouth disease vaccines. Licensed FMD vaccines in Vietnam cover only serotypes O, A and Asia1, leaving the herd unprotected against SAT-1, which the Ministry says is spreading through cross-border livestock movements. The move is a step up from April’s focus on diagnostic kits at the border, and signals Hanoi is willing to spend on prevention rather than just surveillance. The same risk runs further south to Indonesia, where the herd is still rebuilding from earlier FMD outbreaks and another disease event would land hard on already thin local supply. Anything that tightens biosecurity at the Cambodia and Laos crossings makes the unofficial Thai cattle flows into Vietnam more difficult, slower and more expensive, and that is precisely the segment that has been competing with disease-free Australian cattle on price for a long time. 

PHILIPPINES: slaughter steers $3.08kg live weight (PHP 44 = $1 AUD) 

Philippine livestock prices have continued to drift in a familiar direction. Wet market beef knuckle is around $8.30, supermarket knuckle near $9.55, with slaughter steers around $3.08. Pork carcass is steady around $5.57, and broilers sit near $3.86, with branded chicken, such as Magnolia, trading closer to $5.61. The slightly weaker peso is doing some of the work in the AUD conversions, but the local currency picture has been very flat. With no major policy change, the Philippines section is genuinely quiet. The zero-tariff debate is still ticking along in the background but has not moved decisively in either direction. TQ 

CASSAVA HARVESTING AND THE DRYING PROCESS 

DR MICHAEL PATCHING IN JAKARTA 

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Dr Michael Patching’s blog seabeefreport.com aims to inform the reader about the beef industry in South-East Asia with particular reference to the live export trade from Australia. Beef consumers in Asia will, in due course, be the biggest single customer group for Australia. Therefore, it’s essential that the Australian industry has a good understanding of this market maximise its potential. Finding information in foreign countries is a difficult process for individuals in Australia to achieve. Ross’s experience gives him insights that Australian producers and other industry stake holders can’t easily obtain.