November 2, 2010

 

Russia tops US in poultry market

Deep-frozen chicken, arriving from 18 US plants, doesn't compete with the fresh whole birds that are the mainstay of Russian production, says the US Poultry and Egg Export Council president, James Sumner.

 

In the 1990s, US chicken imports were at the top of the market, plump and yellowish at a time when Russian chicken tended to be scrawny, bluish and scarce.

 

Back then, nearly a million tonnes of leg quarters flowed across the Atlantic every year - chicken parts that don't command very high prices in the US, but that nicely filled a Russian preference for dark meat. Russians liked them so much that they took to calling them "Bush legs," after the first President Bush.

 

For the first nine months of this year, they were banned outright, on the grounds that the chlorine disinfectant used by US producers is unhealthy. Now, after a relentless full-court press by the US industry, and hard bargaining over Russia's entry into the WTO, they're coming in again, washed with a different antimicrobial solution. But Russian shoppers complain about their water content, and worry, after a campaign in the Russian press, about hormones and antibiotics.

 

You won't find Bush legs in the supermarkets of Moscow or almost any other major city. Only poor people in the boondocks, schoolchildren and patrons of fast food restaurants that sell chicken gets them. (Except not one of the largest chains, Rostik's-KFC, which despite its US affiliation says it sells only Russian chicken.

 

A lot of Bush legs are likely to end up as processed ingredients in other foods.

 

"The customer thinks he's eating a Russian sausage, when in fact he's eating an American chicken leg," exclaims Sergei Lisovsky, a member of the upper house of the Russian parliament who founded one of the country's largest poultry producers.

 

Lisovsky, a onetime nightclub entrepreneur and political operative, says Americans are dumping legs here, at less than cost, because they can't sell them at home. They drove the old poultry factories out of business in the 1990s. But now Russia can feed its own, he says, and should stop accommodating Americans just because it wants to join the WTO. Also, he says, with brand new factories and strict health requirements, Russia produces a better-quality product.

 

The government says Russia still needs to import more than half a million tonnes of chicken a year, 14% of total sales. Lisovsky says that's about a half million tonnes too much and accuses the government of inflating its estimate to keep on the Americans' good side.

 

On the other hand, US producers point out that they lost about US$400 million in Russian sales because of this year's ban, which followed several others over the past decade-bans that coincided with the revival of Russia's domestic poultry business.

 

Sergei Yushin, head of the National Meat Association, believes Russia will continue to be a good customer for US producers, in part because Russians like dark meat so much.