World meat industry news

The National News Service (NSN) published a comment by the Executive Director of the National Meat Association (NMA) Sergey Yushin on the initiative of Senator Yevgeny Savchenko to ban meat imports to Russia.  

Sergey Yushin warned live on the NSN that the rupture of foreign economic contacts would lead Russia to the loss of foreign markets, including China, which had concluded mutually beneficial contracts with domestic producers for the supply of poultry food products. In his speech, he stressed that almost all countries sell something and buy something. Many of them are able to fully provide the population with meat products, but they conduct bilateral trade on the world market.

By joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Russian Federation assumed certain obligations. For nearly 20 years, customs and tariff regulation measures have been in place that determine the conditions for the import of meat. In particular, Savchenko made a recommendation to abolish trade relations with Belarus, which supplies Russia with more than 60% of poultry meat and 40% of beef, said the head of the industry association.

In response to the import ban, external counterparties may stop purchasing products in Russia, and not all of them will find sales within the country. For example, chicken feet: in China it is a delicacy, but in our country this part of the broiler carcass ends up in biological waste. Economic independence does not mean the closure of the market: it is necessary not to prohibit, but to flexibly and effectively use the possibilities of customs and tariff regulation within the framework of participation in the WTO, Sergey Yushin explained.

In particular, next year Russia can buy up to 200 thousand tons of beef, although it has the right to set an import duty of 27.5%. The development of the domestic market is possible only if it is protected in combination with the development of domestic production. It is worth considering that sometimes negotiations on access to foreign markets of the Rosselkhoznadzor, the Ministry of Agriculture and trade representatives of Russia abroad are carried out for seven to eight years, the expert recalled, and it would be foolish to lose all the achievements overnight.

According to the NMA, today Russia ranks 5th in the world in broiler and pork production and 3rd in pork production. Pork imports have actually come to naught, but even here, within the framework of healthy international competition, quotas and duties are used. If 10 years ago our country bought about 1.25 million tons from abroad, this year it imported 15 thousand tons with a sufficient volume of domestic production (about 4.5 million tons, of which at least 200 thousand tons will be exported) . Supplies of Russian poultry meat are carried out in 60 countries.

Regarding Savchenko's second proposal to intensively process excess meat on the domestic market into canned food, Yushin said that in a force majeure situation, such reserves could be very useful. For example, in areas affected by floods, it is impossible to deliver chilled meat - in contrast to canned meat, which does not require special transportation conditions.

Relatively recently, a significant part of the state reserve was unprocessed meat (including bones). Today, its storage seems to be irrational in terms of energy costs and the use of storage facilities. Canning meat will really save some of the costs, Sergei Yushin agreed. He added that cutting and deboning specialists are needed to use meat on the bone, otherwise the bones will go nowhere, although this is a valuable raw material and can also be exported.