Perdue Foods will join U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Under Secretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs Ted McKinney on a trade mission to Southern Africa October 29 through November 2, USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) reported Friday.
Perdue joins about three dozen other agricultural associations on the mission, which will be based in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. Participating organizations will also visit with potential customers in Angola, Botswana, eSwatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In addition to personalized business-to-business meetings arranged by local FAS staff, organizations may join in-depth briefings and site visits to gather local market intelligence.
NCC and the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council (USAPEEC) have recently met with USDA and the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to bring issues of interest regarding South Africa to our government’s attention.
Collectively, the U.S. exported $627 million in agricultural products to Southern Africa in 2017, led by $249 million in poultry meat and products imports, excluding eggs—an increase from $114 million in 2016.
South Africa currently has an import quota of 65,000 tons at the “most-favored-nation” tariff rate of 37 percent for chicken legs and prohibitively high anti-dumping tariff rates above the quota. Namibia opened its market to U.S. poultry in May 2018 and FAS projects that Namibian broiler meat imports could increase by about 3.5 percent this year, reaching approximately 30,500 tons in 2018.
