Beef exports set value record
Washington Ag Today December 14, 2011 The most recent statistics on U.S. beef and pork exports cover October and annual value records are being set. Phil Seng is President and CEO of the U.S. Meat Export Federation, which does market development work overseas. Seng: “With two months left in the year we have already eclipsed our performance for last year both in the beef complex and the pork complex and set records in both areas. So, very encouraging results. We see this trend continuing. And hopefully this will be enough impetus for us to start rebuilding our herds because of what we are seeing now, some of these international markets are clearly outbidding our domestic market for some of these products.” When many markets closed their doors to U.S. beef because of BSE the U.S. industry diversified its markets and Seng says that is paying off. Seng: “We are in more markets now than we ever have been and we are selling probably a wider array of items than we have ever sold before. So we have taken a negative and really made it a positive. And what is even more encouraging is when Japan, and obviously when we have access to China and some of these other markets, unbridled access., it is going to be exciting for the beef industry.” The new annual U.S. beef export value record is 4.49 billion dollars and it is expected that will top five billion dollars by year’s end for the first time ever. The work of the U.S. Meat Export Federation is supported by Beef Checkoff dollars. I’m Bob Hoff and that’s Washington Ag Today on Northwest Aginfo Net.
