By Cat Holmes

University of Georgia

Every time someone eats a chicken breast, it compounds the
biggest problem the U.S. poultry industry faces.

That’s because the U.S. poultry market has more dark meat than it
knows what to do with, said Eric Joiner, president, chief
operating officer and co-founder of food-distribution giant AJC
International.

Americans like white-meat

“The U.S. is such a white-meat market,” Joiner said in the 18th
annual J.W. Fanning Lecture Dec. 11 on the University of Georgia
campus in Athens, Ga.

Former chairman of the U.S. Poultry and Egg Export Council
and a current member of its board of directors, Joiner is one of
the world’s authorities on U.S. poultry exports.

In the lecture, Joiner noted three major challenges the poultry
industry faces.

Compounding the dark-meat export problem, he said, is the fact
that the U.S. market demands large chicken breasts. That means
large leg quarters, which aren’t appealing in the Asian markets
that have a demand for dark-meat chicken.

“The industry has to move over 6 billion large leg quarters this
year,” Joiner said. “The export market can’t take it.”

Brazil is our biggest competitor

The second major challenge, he said, is competition from Brazil,
which is second only to the United States in worldwide broiler
production.

“(Brazil) is blowing the doors off production,” Joiner said.
“They have an incredible ability to grow and harvest soybeans (a
chief component in chicken feed). And their plants are
first-class. Brazil’s exports grew by 38 percent in 2001.”

While he expects Brazil’s export growth rate to eventually level
out, Brazil poses a substantial threat to U.S. poultry producers,
he said, because of lower labor costs and high production
standards.

“If Brazil is limited at all, it is only in market access,”
Joiner said.

Industry needs more markets

The third problem, he said, is market access. Making current
markets more accessible and opening up new markets are crucial to
the industry’s growth. “This is why everyone was so interested in
Cuba opening its markets,” he said.

After outlining the problems, Joiner offered possible
solutions:

“The U.S. could cut production, although that is very hard to
do,” he said. “We need to develop more dark-meat products for the
domestic market. We need to push hard to open up new markets and
aggressively fund the industry fight for market access. We need
to take food safety issues seriously and find a way to compete
with the Brazilian labor market.

“The picture isn’t pretty,” Joiner said. “But now you know what
it looks like.”

While the industry picture is grim, it’s ripe for study, said
Glenn Ames, an agricultural economist with UGA’s College of
Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Ames specializes in
the poultry industry.

“Mr. Joiner has provided us with a tremendous menu of topics for
further work and study here at UGA,” he said. “These are topics
that are vital for Georgia’s economy.”

Georgia is the top-producing broiler state in the U.S.
Economists figure the economic impact of poultry in the state at
more than $13 billion annually.

Coan and students recognized

A luncheon and awards ceremony followed Joiner’s lecture. Gaylord
Coan, who retired in 2001 as chief executive officer and chairman
of the management executive committee of Gold Kist, Inc.,
received the 2002 Award of Excellence from the UGA CAES Alumni
Association.

Two CAES agricultural and applied economics students, Carol
Spruill and Swagata Banerjee, were recognized for their induction
into Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and
Colleges.

The J.W. Fanning lecture series is named for a former vice
president for services and professor of agricultural economics at
UGA. Fanning was instrumental in developing public service and
outreach at UGA.