Australian farmers would be forced to sell their barley supplies to the domestic livestock industry or cheaper international markets after China effectively banned imports from the nation, Australian farmers said yesterday.
China late on Tuesday said that it would ban barley imports from Australia’s largest grain exporter, just weeks after it slapped a more than 80 percent tariff on shipments from the nation.
Barley shipments from CBH Grain Pty Ltd would be halted after pests were found on multiple occasions, the Chinese General Administration of Customs said on its official WeChat account.
CBH, a cooperative of farmers, denied the charge as it said it would work with the government in Canberra to overturn the ruling.
The ruling has seen Chinese processors shun other Australian sellers amid fears that Beijing could ban other grain handlers.
As a result, Australian farmers would now target the domestic market, where demand is unusually high after a three-year drought wilted large areas of pasture.
“The financial hit will be enormous, but we can look at domestic livestock market, which doesn’t have much feed at hand after the drought,” said Andrew Weidemann, a grain grower in Victoria state.
“The big issue is next year. If the season continues, there will be pasture, and so farmers like myself will have to switch to other crops” he added.
China had until earlier this year bought as much as 70 percent of Australia’s barley exports.
However, with that market closed, Australian farmers are likely to receive about A$50 (US$37) per tonne less than what China would typically pay.
The disruption of Australia’s barley market comes amid souring bilateral relations with Beijing.
Already inflamed by Canberra’s allegations that China was meddling in its domestic affairs, relations worsened when Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an independent inquiry into the origins of COVID-19, which was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year.
China just weeks later slapped on the tariff.
Last month, it said it would also investigate whether Australian wine was being dumped into its largest buyer, a review that has since been expanded to include possible subsidies.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS