Shipping camels, whether they are dead or alive, across an arid area that big, where few roads exist, is logistically near impossible, Ms Matthews says.

Pastoralist Ian Conway, who also runs an education program for Aboriginal kids and a successful tourism business from his station at Kings Creek, about 300km southwest of Alice Springs, would rather see the camel carcasses going to good use than have a repeat of the situation that occurred at Docker River recently.

The NT government was forced to undertake an emergency cull of some 6000 camels, when the community at Docker River, about 500km southwest of Alice Springs on the Western Australia border, was held hostage in November last year by a herd of thirsty, marauding camels.

As well as camels smashing water infrastructure in their hunt for moisture, the quality of drinking water in the town of 350 people was threatened by the decaying bodies of camels that were trampled by their herd.

The camels inundated the airport, making it nearly impossible for aircraft to land or for medical emergency evacuations to take place.

Mr Conway said many people were forced to leave the town after the cull due to a fly infestation and the strong stench of rotting camel that lingered in the air.

"I'm dead set against shooting camels; I don't see any sense in it," Mr Conway said.

"It's sad that the government has decided through their own bureaucrats that the only way to get rid of the camel population is to shoot them and leave them on the ground to feed the dingoes.

"So we're feeding one pest by killing another one that could be a viable export commodity for Australia."

Mr Conway said he and local slaughterman Garry Dann would be working hard this year to get a full-scale camel meat industry operating in central Australia.

"At Kings Creek we found last year, even with the small amounts that we sold, that we had people coming back second and third nights to eat camel," he said.

"It's an absolutely marvellous meat."

According to the Draft National Feral Camel Action Plan only a small minority of central Australian pastoralists benefit from feral camels by way of live export, tourism and meat trade, totalling a value of about $580,000 across all properties annually.

The draft states that for stakeholders seeking to generate economic returns from removing camels from the landscape, the markets to help do so are limited.

"Although the current number of camels removed is small, commercial capture and sale could potentially remove enough animals to have a significant localised impact on the levels of damage currently being caused and may form part of an integrated management approach," it says.

"However, establishment of a long term sustainable camel industry will need to be based on farmed camels, not the opportunistic harvest of a free-ranging feral herd."

Even NT Chief Minister Paul Henderson disputes the potential viability of a camel meat industry.

"Just because we've got a lot of camels doesn't mean there's a lot of people prepared to pay money for them," he told the Centralian Advocate.

However, Mr Dann from Centralian Gold, the company responsible for mustering feral camels and processing them at the abattoir at Wamboden, about 30km north of Alice Springs, says he wouldn't be putting in such an effort if it wasn't a lucrative and sustainable industry.

Mr Dann told AAP he was in the final stages of gaining accreditation to export his camel products to the United Arab Emirates and that he expected to be processing 100 feral camels a day from July onwards.

"Feral animals have got to be managed," he said.

Recently branching out into the small-goods sector, Mr Dann said there was considerable interest in the low cholesterol, high protein meat around Australia.

The popularity of camel meat is growing considerably, as a new form of ethical eating emerges.

"Cameltarians" exclude all meat, except the one-humped free-range dromedaries, from their diets on the grounds that they are killed more humanely and cause less damage to the environment than hard-hoofed animals like cattle or sheep.

"The more wild animals that can be processed for human consumption the better," Mr Dann said.

"The camel deserves better than to be just shot and left to rot; they can be processed and be even more helpful to mankind like they have in the past with the (Afghan) pioneers."

Mr Dann is on the verge of signing a contract to supply 10 per cent of Australia's Muslim population with halal camel meat and has been asked to turn the less popular cuts of meat into jerky to contribute to aid relief efforts across the world.

With two Australian abattoirs now processing camel, the draft acknowledges that there are "some ongoing, if small-scale, local suppliers of camel meat" with niche markets.

"Although the number of Aboriginal people eating camel meat is increasing, this is not consistent across communities," it states.

While many Aborigines are enthused by the employment opportunities feral camel mustering could provide, the decision about whether to consume or cull the camels, for many of them, is a difficult one.

Aborigines, particularly those out at Docker River and Mutitjulu, near Uluru, have seen first hand the damage being done to their sacred sites and water holes by the feral camels.

However, they also feel an obligation to protect the animal that the three wise men rode when they followed the Star of Bethlehem to bestow gifts upon baby Jesus in a manger.

The draft, which details the circumstances of all of the various stakeholder groups and focuses largely on the camel-related plight of Aborigines, states that the impact of the camels on Australia has been cultural, social, economic and environmental.

And it is those environmental issues that pastoralists believe will have the most influence on decisions made by politicians as to how the camel crisis would be best managed.

While Aborigines, remote community residents, pastoralists and land care groups deal with the problems on the ground, they claim politicians based in Canberra spend their time debating camel-related issues that the "real stakeholders" believe to be irrelevant or of little importance.

The majority of camel trek operators in central Australia say they have received no information about how the federal government's proposed carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS) will affect them and, frankly, they don't care.

Earlier this month, The Australian newspaper reported that despite camels being the third highest carbon-emitting animal per head on the planet, only emissions from domesticated tourist ride-type camels were counted under the current Kyoto protocol.

Scientists argued that culling the one million feral camels that currently roam the outback would be equal to taking 300,000 cars off the road, the paper said.

However, indifferent to the ETS debate, stakeholders are hopeful such an argument will convince more foreigners that managing Australia's feral camel population is a good idea.

Last year UK residents outraged by plans to cull the camels at Docker River began warning other Europeans against visiting Australia.

The Times Online published a story about the $49,000 aerial cull plan, which prompted an influx of public comment.

One NT minister even began receiving hate mail from around the world.

The comments, which labelled Australia as a third world nation, mirrored similar attacks made on US television early last year, calling Prime Minister Kevin Rudd a "serial killer" for allowing the animals to be culled.

The talk show host even called the cull "genocide" and used a stuffed camel toy to demonstrate how the animals would be killed.

Pastoralists say foreigners, who have little understanding of the harsh and vast Australian outback, would not be advising Australia to "build a water hole" if they understood the seriousness of the situation.

The Draft National Feral Camel Action Plan received 32 submissions in total before public consultation closed on January 30, 2010.

A spokeswoman for the federal Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts told AAP that officials would be working to finalise the document over the coming months in consultation with their state and territory counterparts.