Brazilian farmers eye Beijing’s chicken feet market
CHINA’S ban on poultry imports from the US, where flocks have been ravaged by bird flu, could give more Brazilian farmers a foot in the door of the biggest import market, literally.
It is chickens’ feet the Chinese are especially keen on – a popular side dish they will pay as much for as the breast. A delegation from China’s quarantine office in Beijing left Brazil earlier this month after a 10-day mission to inspect potential new meat suppliers in four states, the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency said.
Brazil already supplies about half of China’s broiler-meat imports. Export approval for seven extra packing plants could push chicken-meat sales to China to $800 million (R10 billion) from $518m last year, the trade group, known as Apex, said. For US farmers, that could cut into their most lucrative overseas market for chicken feet.
“There is no country in the world that consumes as much chicken feet as China, or that pays the prices China does,” Reni Eduardo Girardi, an industrial manager at CVale, said. The agribusiness co-operative would ship 15 340 tons of chicken meat to China this year, accounting for a quarter of its chicken-meat exports, Girardi said.
Brazilian companies Sao Salvador Alimentos, BRF, Cooperativa Agroindustrial Copagril and JBS also stand to benefit from greater access to the Chinese poultry-meat market.
Feeding more mouths in Asia would help cement Brazil’s place as the largest supplier of food and agricultural products after the US, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) said this month.
Agricultural output has more than doubled since 1990 in the South American country and livestock production has almost trebled, thanks to productivity gains.
“Brazil is poised to become the foremost supplier in meeting additional global demand, mostly originating from Asia,” the groups said in their 148page OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2015-2024 report, which featured Brazil. The nation is predicted to be the top beef and poultry exporter by 2024, with export shares of 20 percent and 31 percent, respectively.
That is a threat to US exports, already hurt by more than 220 detections of highly pathogenic avian influenza since December 19. The deadly virus, which has affected 48 million birds, was last reported on June 17, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
China bought more than $170m of chicken feet from the US last year, making it the biggest overseas market for the product, according to a February report by USDA staff. Sales were halted when poultry and poultry products were banned by China in January.
That helped push the import price in China for chicken feet to an average of $1 600 a ton in the first quarter, a 10 percent increase from a year earlier, Rabobank International said in a report in May.
China bought more than $170m of chicken feet from the US last year, according to a report.