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The days when U.S. poultry exporters considered Russia their primary overseas market are officially over, according to the Stone Mountain-based USA Poultry & Egg Export Council, which announced on Feb. 10 that U.S. poultry exports set a new record last year despite a Russian embargo of most U.S. food and agricultural products.
“In the late 1980s when the Berlin Wall came down, the first President Bush established a Food Aid package for Russia primarily made up of chicken leg quarters,” Toby Moore, a council spokesman, told Global Atlanta.
“The Russians, particularly those on the lower end of the economic scale learned that they could feed a family for a few days on those ‘Bush leg’ quarters.”
The result was that Russia became the industry’s largest market by far, growing to as much as 40 percent and more of the total poultry exports from the U.S.
During the 1990s, however, Mr. Moore said, some suppliers became complacent and less careful about their shipments providing the Russians with an excuse to demand quality checks of U.S. plants because of spoiled cargoes.
While the Russians used the quality checks as a way of controlling their market, the Russian poultry industry was expanding.
In a tit-for-tat response to European Union sanctions against Russia over the crisis in the Ukraine, Russia banned a wide range of food imports including poultry in August 2014.
But the upshot of these sanctions has been minimal, Mr. Moore said, in view of year-end trade data released last week by the Foreign Agricultural Service.
The combined value of U.S. poultry and egg exports for 2014 came within less than one percentage point of the previous record, set in 2013, reaching $58-plus billion, down just 0.2 percent, according to the FAS data.
The top markets last year for U.S. broiler meat exports, excluding chicken paws, were Mexico, up 9 percent to 696,230 tons; Russia, down 48 percent to 143,942 tons; Angola up 12 percent 231,717 tons and Canada down 4 percent to 162,699 tons.
Other key broiler markets cited by the council include Cuba, up 3 percent to 143,582 percent; Iraq, including transshipments via Turkey, down 10 percent to 147,774 tons; China, down 10 percent to 117,887 tons; Taiwan up 20 percent to 115,407 tons; Hong Kong, up 47 percent to 105,445 tons and the country of Georgia, up 1 percent to 87,368 tons.
For more information, Mr. Moore may be reached by email at tmoore@usapeec.org or by calling the council at 770-413-0006.