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Senator Thomas Richard "Tom" Carper, a Democrat, is the dean of Delaware's Congressional Delegation and a member of the Senate Finance Committee. Last Tuesday, January 27, the Committee held a hearing on President Obama's trade agenda. The witness was U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, and when the time came for Senator Carper to question the Trade Representative, he put a lot of emphasis on U.S. poultry exports, in a word, chickens. Here is more from the passage in which he pressed that issue:
"The reason why Senator Isakson [Republican of Georgia], yours truly [Senator Carper], Senator Cardin [Democrat of Maryland], [Senator] Mark Warner [Democrat of Virginia], continue to focus on poultry [is] it's a huge industry on the Delmarva Peninsula. ...
"We only have three countries in Delaware. ... Sussex is the third largest country in America. We raise more soybean there than any county in America. We use the  soybean and the corn that we raise on the Delmarva Peninsula to raise all of those chickens. They outnumber us 300 to 1 in Delaware, and we want to make sure that we can sell them to as many markets as possible."
Poultry is indeed big business. Exports of U.S. broiler or chicken meat in 2013 were valued at roughly $4.3 billion. And not surprisingly the National Chicken Council (NCC) is a pro-trade (or at least a pro-TPA) organization. In a January 26 press release, NCC's president, Mike Brown, explained that "with 20 percent of our production being exported to more than 100 countries, outside-the-[U.S.]-border customers are becoming more and more important, especially for our dark meat products." So, the NCC is urging Congress to pass Trade Promotion Authority, primarily in the hope that it will lead to an approved deal in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.
And yet there are problems:
Russia is blocking U.S. exports largely for geopolitical reasons.
South Africa imposes anti-dumping duties on certain poultry imports from the United States.
India has blocked various poultry exports from the U.S. for several years now over concerns about avian flu. The U.S. took the matter to the WTO and won, at least at the first stage, but the case is not over yet. On January 26, India formally appealed the initial decision.
The European Union. Here the problem for U.S. producers is the familiar one of process regulations. Senator Isakson of Georgia explained the issue:
"On the one hand, the Europeans will talk about giving market access - for example, to poultry - but on the other hand, they'll say, 'But, we [in Europe] won't take any poultry that's washed with hyperchlorinated water.' Well, that's the way it's produced in the United States of America, whether Delaware or Georgia or Texas or California. They use the regulation to be the barrier, not the product."
Canada has its supply management system for milk, cheese, eggs, and poultry, a system that all of the U.S. producers of those products would like to see changed.
And as if all of this were not enough, China and several other countries have recently banned U.S. poultry, following the discovery of avian flu last December in Oregon and Washington. Those were backyard birds. No cases have been found in U.S. commercial poultry.
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