Australia's environmental legacy poorly marketed: China market analyst

James Kynge, Editor of Emerging Markets at the Financial Times, with a woolly friend at the 2014 Sheep Updates at the University of Western Australia. (Olivia Garnett)

The Chinese connect with 'land brands' and Australian farmers would greatly benefit if their environmental legacy was better marketed.

That's according to Financial Times emerging markets editor James Kynge, based in London, who was the keynote speaker at the 2014 Sheep Updates conference in Perth, hosted by the Department of Agriculture and Food WA.

"They love the idea of things they eat coming from a certain constitution of land and water," he said.

Mr Kynge spends a lot of time analyzing China's key economic trends.

He says Chinese consumers value exclusivity above all.

"In a way it's a bit of a function of population; if you're 'one in a million' in China, there's 1,400 people just like you.

"The price that Chinese wealthy people are willing to pay for something that's rare and of very high quality is really getting higher and higher.

"In China, it's very common to go to a locality and to find that a locality is described universally as the land of fish and rice, or the land of mountain and mist, or whatever it may be.

"Chinese brand land all over China, so why can't Western Australia brand its own terroir?"

So what could WA's 'land brand' be?

Mr Kynge has a few suggestions.

"The land of wine and whales. The land of fine wool and few people. The land of 10,000-year-old pasture.

"Here your pasture is so biodiverse, so rich. China virtually has no pasture that hasn't been tilled.

"You have huge environmental advantages and I think they are relatively little understood in China."

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