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Shining Light on Farm & Food Policy for 20 Years.
Thursday, March 06, 2025
Shipments of U.S. poultry are getting caught up in delays at Mexico’s border after Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered increased inspections of north-bound trucks, spurring protests by Mexican truckers who blocked southbound traffic.
Representatives of the U.S. poultry industry descended in Havana last week to implore the Cuban government to loosen bans on U.S. chicken after outbreaks of bird flu in major producing states.
Poultry and egg producers are closely watching the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza, which has already hit more states than the 2014-2015 outbreak and infected close to half the number of birds as it did seven years ago.
Top trade officials from the U.S. and UK will meet in Baltimore, Md., next week – the first of two scheduled meetings announced Wednesday by the Biden administration – sparking new hope that the two countries are moving closer to negotiations for a free trade agreement.
The U.S. exports more than $130 million worth of poultry and poultry products annually to Central Asian nations and other nearby countries like Armenia and Georgia, but all of that trade is threatened by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The U.S.-China trade relationship is so incendiary that any misstep could have dire ramifications, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai told a gathering of American chicken industry officials Thursday in Washington.
U.S. poultry has only regained access to the Chinese chicken market for about a year and a half, but trade is booming and the U.S. was the number-one supplier to China in the last two months of 2020.
Just eight months ago, U.S. chicken farmers were celebrating the reopening of the Chinese market. Now they’re cheering the dizzying pace of sales that have pushed China to the number-one position in April and May in foreign markets, and the trade shows no sign of slowing down.
China has banned chicken from a Tyson Foods plant in Springdale, Arkansas, just as U.S. exports of poultry to Chinese buyers are spiking, according to sources, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.
The first shipment of U.S. chicken to be sent to China in years will be arriving in January, marking the resumption in trade after China lifted its ban just a little over a month ago, USA Poultry and Egg Export Council President Jim Sumner tells Agri-Pulse.
