Australian officials are working in overdrive to resolve a temporary ban on beef shipments into China.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in Australian beef exports are at stake after China raised concerns about the labelling of some recent shipments from six processors.
Trade Minister Steven Ciobo has received a letter from China's quarantine agency raising concerns over labels on some boxes of exported beef that do not match the labels on the packets inside.
"This is a very significant and substantial export trade with China with potentially tens of millions and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in trade affected," Mr Ciobo told AAP on Wednesday evening.
"We are taking the matter very seriously. I have been engaging today and will continue to engage with Chinese authorities and the Australian embassy to try to resolve this matter as efficiently as possible."
Mr Ciobo has spoken with nearly all of the chief executives of the impacted companies, indicating the government was "very mobilised" in attempting to resolve the matter.
"I feel for the facility owners and workers," Mr Ciobo said.
The Weekly Times reported China's concerns may be related to recent comments by the Foreign Minister Julie Bishop on China's military ambitions.
But Ms Bishop and Defence Minister Marise Payne both sought to quash this theory.
"It has nothing to do with health or food safety concerns, nothing to do with matters of international diplomacy, but is actually about labelling of meat from particular plants," Senator Payne told ABC radio.
"I think it would be engaging in rather an extreme stretch of the imagination to presume it was linked to anything else."
