LatinNews Daily - 09 January 2024

*The Brazilian meat industry lobby group, Associação Brasileira de Proteína Animal (Abpa), has released its annual figures for chicken meat exports in 2023, registering 5.14m tonnes (t) of poultry exported, up 6.6% from 2022. Chicken meat exports in December 2023 totalled 467,200 t, up 20.9% year-on-year and marking a record figure for the month of December. The current monthly record was set in March 2023, when 514,600 t of chicken meat were exported. The top export destinations in December were Japan (55,900 t), China (50,300 t), and the United Arab Emirates (44,300 t). The top chicken-producing states were in Brazil’s southern region. Paraná exported 2.09m t, while Santa Catarina registered 1.10m t and Rio Grande do Sul registered 739,000 t. In a press release, Abpa’s president, Ricardo Santin, was cited as praising the sector’s effective measures implemented last year to contain the spread of bird flu (avian influenza). Since the first cases of the H5N1 strain of bird flu were detected among wild birds in May 2023, in the south-eastern state of Espírito Santo, the government had registered three cases among domestic birds and zero cases among commercial poultry.