Reports circulating out of Indonesia and Australia last week could have devastating consequences for New Zealand beef exports to Indonesia.

Although only early days, I-Farm says that reports indicate the Indonesian Government intends to slash its reliance on live cattle imports and beef imports next year, as the country moves to become self sufficient in beef.

Current import quotas are restricted to 90,000 tonnes annually which is typically shared between NZ and Australia.

Indonesia is now signalling it will drop the beef import quota to 35,000t in 2012, which could effectively wipe this market out for New Zealand, or at the very, least make it extremely hard going.