BEEF CONSUMPTION IN US AS COMPARED TO OTHERS

Beef Consumption in United States compared to other countries

Beef Consumption in United States compared to other countries.

Perspectives in the demand for meat products look promising because of increasing incomes around the world and changes in consumer preferences favoring meat and dairy products. Within that context, Mercosur countries seem to be in a good position to take advantage of this favorable scenario. Brazil is a leading player in the beef, poultry, and pork world markets. Focused attention has now been placed on dairy production as well, in order to improve productivity to attain self-sufficiency, or even become a net exporter.

Argentina too has been a leading player in the world beef market, but has been losing ground because of domestic policies that favored domestic consumption, and avoiding inflation, over exports. Argentina has historically been a very minor poultry producer and a net importer, but recently has been able to use favorable exchange rates to become a net exporter. Dairy continues to be an active industry with strong exports. The pork sector is neither efficient nor large, and remains a minor activity. The goal of this paper is to present an analysis of beef consumption in the United States compared with two of South America's leading livestock economies, Brazil and Argentina. The analysis will focus on recent trends and future scenarios related to factor endowments, economic policies, and the behavior of the micro economy.

Trends

Meat consumers have benefited from the increasingly liberal trade environment and the globalization of meat markets (Figure 1). Within a more free trade environment, the most important variables that will shape the global meat complex in near term will be positive macroeconomic growth and market disruptions form disease outbreaks (USDA, 2005a,b,c). Macro growth will spur new investments that expand and modernize production, while consumer demand will provide new and growing markets for a variety of meat and dairy products. At the same time, red meat and poultry meat prices for major exporters will continued to be influenced by disease-related trade disruptions.

Livestock diseases such as Avian Influenza (AI) (Asia and Europe), foot and mouth disease (FMD) in Brazil and Argentina, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) (Europe, North America, and Japan) continue to impact global trade and are cause for great concern. Nevertheless global meat consumption continues to climb spurring increased production and growth in exports (Figure 2). Brazil and Argentina only accounted for 16% of the global beef trade in 2001, but are forecast to account for over 35% of that beef trade in 2006. Beef exports from 2001 to 2005 have increased 25% or 1,280,000 metric tons (Table 1). Brazil's exports have grown over 1 mmt, as a result of the fall in United States (US) exports due to the BSE problem. In relative terms, Mercosur countries (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay) have also shown a noticeable increase in market share. In year 2001 these countries represented 19% of world exports, while in year 2005 the share reached 42% of the ...