Colombia exporting beef to Lebanon
By Manuel Rueda, Editorial Director
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Three thousand cebu bulls were shipped alive from Barranquilla to Beirut on Saturday, opening what cattle ranchers here are hoping will become a regular – yet distant -- destination for Colombia´s beef exports.
Colombian farmers and cattle ranchers have been forced to find new markets for their produce over the past six months as Venezuela´s President Chavez blocked the entry of several Colombian products into his country following tensions over a military cooperation deal between Colombia and the US.
The bulls come from several ranches in Colombia´s coastal region and were shipped to the Middle East in a special boat called the Pollux, which is 115 meters long and 15 meters wide, and has corrals were the bulls will be fed and well kept during the 22 day journey across the Atlantic ocean and Mediterranean sea.
The Pollux belongs to the Sleiman Company for Livestock, a Lebanese company that has arranged over 200 shipments of Brazilian bulls to Venezuela over the past three years.
The Colombian bulls headed to Beirut were shipped along with 500 tons of food and 800 tonnes of water and the crew includes 12 men who will be exclusively responsible for taking care of the animals.
Miguel Maal, the legal representative of the Colombian company that arranged for the shipment of the Colombian bulls to Beirut, said that the Lebanese required that the bulls “not be castrated” because “that way they develop more muscle tissue.”
He told the press that during the trip, the bovines – who weigh an average of 500 kilos each – are expected to lose some 20 kilos, but that soon after arriving in Beirut they will be nursed back to recovery in special corrals before they are taken to the slaughterhouse.
Maal is confident that this first shipment will lead to regular orders for Colombian bulls in Lebanon, a country with many social and cultural ties to Colombia´s Caribbean coast, as thousands of Lebanese settled there during the 20th century.
Maal – who is also of Lebanese descent -- said that a second shipment of 5,000 bulls is expected to leave for Beirut in March, adding that the Lebanese paid 2 million dollars for these first two loads of bulls.
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