Brazil seeks to boost pork exports to South Korea
SAO PAULO — Korea agreed to allow the imports of Brazilian pork only in 2018, following more than 10 years of negotiations. As of now, the country only accounts for 1 percent of Brazil’s pork exports. From January to July in 2019, Brazil exported 3,000 tons of pork to Korea, valued at 6.6 billion won ($5.4 million).
Ricardo Santin, CEO of the Brazilian Association of Animal Protein (ABPA) — the political and institutional representative of poultry and pork production in Brazil — told The Korea Times that he wanted to boost exports.
Koreans consumed more than 1.3 million tons of pork in 2018, according the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. The country imports 30 percent of total consumption (464,000 tons), but only 0.65 percent of it came from Brazil.
Santin said any increase in Brazil’s pork exports mostly hinged on Korea. “If Korea intends to buy more pork from Brazil, we are ready to supply,” he said in a recent interview at a restaurant in Sao Paulo. “But the Korean market is excessively competitive for us, due to high tariffs. Therefore, we are trying to have a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) deal between Korea and Mercosur, hoping this will reduce tariffs.”
Established in 1991, Mercosur is a South American trading bloc, comprising Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, that promotes free trade. Korea has been in talks with Mercosur for an FTA deal since 2018.
Asked why Korea and Brazil’s negotiations on pork imports took more than 10 years, Santin again said Korea was more responsible for the delay. “It was a situation involving both Brazil and Korea, but it depended more on Korea,” he said. “Korea had to allow us to sell pork after checking our system and having some negotiations. But the delay in timing was a decision made by Korea.”
A spokesman for Korea’s Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency told The Korea Times that the country had been cautious due to foot-andmouth disease (FMD) in some Brazilian states. The highly infectious viral illness, which causes a fever and blisters in the mouth and on the feet of pigs, has a fatality rate of 5 percent to 55 percent.
“Brazil is a large country so it took us time to find out which region was completely free of FMD,” he said. “We also heard some pork available in Brazil came from Argentina, where FMD was not yet been exterminated. So we visited Brazil to ascertain the facts.”
The disease has plagued Brazil since 1895. But the country has been an FMD-free zone since 2006, according to the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE).
Nevertheless, Korea has been importing pork only from Santa Catarina State in southern Brazil, which the OIE recognizes as free of FMD, where no vaccination was practiced in the past.
Saying Brazil did not import pork from Argentina, Santin added that the country had been preparing to export pork to Korea from two other states, despite the strict quarantine conditions.
“Rio Grande do Sul and Parana, the two neighboring states of Santa Catarina, are working on this,” the CEO said. “Although vaccination was practiced in these two states in the past, both are now free of FMD. But the OIE needs to declare them as FMDfree regions first. Parana already started the process and asked for a check.”
But Santin said he could not provide details about future exports or revenue from Korea because it was the Brazilian pork producers who set the targets.
Brazil free of African swine fever
However, the Korea Pork Producers Association has recently demanded that the government strengthen its quarantine regulations on Brazilian pork, fearing the possible dissemination of African swine fever (ASF) in the South American country.
ASF is a highly contagious viral disease of pigs that can cause a high fever and internal bleeding, and there is not yet a vaccine. Its mortality rate can be as high as 100 percent for the acute forms and 30 percent to 70 percent for the chronic forms.
The disease recently occurred in China, North Korea, Hong Kong and Vietnam among others, but not in Brazil.