January 19, 2009

 

The US exports hundreds of millions of dollars of poultry to Russia annually, but on Jan. 1 that lucrative market would have disappeared overnight had US officials not been able to convince their Russian counterparts to postpone a measure banning a widely used sanitation process.

 

Russia had planned to ban imports of poultry that are processed with the aid of chlorine, a chemical used widely by US companies to sanitize the birds. That ban, representatives of the US poultry industry say, would have killed trade.

 

The final numbers aren't tabulated yet, but the US is expected to have shipped about 825,000 tonnes of poultry - mostly as chicken leg quarters - to Russia in 2008, said Bill Roenigk, an economist and vice president of the National Chicken Council.

 

"There is no company, on a consistent basis, that doesn't use chlorine ... to reduce pathogens on poultry," Roenigk said.

 

In December, US negotiators convinced Russia not to go through with the plan, said Ellen Terpstra, a deputy undersecretary at the US Department of Agriculture.

 

The threat to trade isn't over yet, though, she told Dow Jones in an interview this week. Now the Russian plan is to implement the ban next year.

 

"We received assurances that the chlorine rule that they were going to put into effect would not come ... until January of 2010," Terpstra said. "So they basically put off for a year that prohibition."

 

And that postponement, she said, will give the US more time to convince Russia to permanently scrap the chlorine ban.

 

Toby Moore, a vice president for the USA Poultry & Egg Export Council, said meetings are already being scheduled so both countries can meet and discuss the postponed Russian proposal. The first meeting may be held as early as February, he said.

 

Negotiators need to move at a quick pace to avoid a last-minute confrontation like what happened in December, Roenigk said. For exporters to make contracts to deliver poultry in January 2010, they would need to know by early November that this issue has been settled.

 

The European Union's ban on chlorine and other chemicals is a constant reminder to US poultry producers of the very real threat of losing export markets. The EU ban was erected in 1997 and stopped the entry of "virtually all US poultry," according to the US Trade Representative. The USTR announced Friday it was officially challenging the EU ban through the World Trade Organization.