China launches probe into Brazilian broiler chicken imports

China on Friday launched an anti-dumping investigation into imports of Brazilian broiler chicken and products after a complaint from the domestic industry that the South American country has been selling its chicken below market value.

Brazil accounted for more than 50 pct of broiler product supplies to China, the world's No. 2 poultry consumer, between 2013 and 2016, a Commerce Ministry statement said on Friday, according to a preliminary review.

Any move to penalize imports worth more than $1 billion a year would be a major blow to Brazil's meat industry following a scandal over its beef exports earlier in the year, which threatened to tarnish the country's powerhouse protein industry.

Brazil replaced the United States as the top supplier of chicken after China slapped anti-dumping duties on U.S. broiler chicken products in 2010.

China is the biggest national consumer of Brazilian meat.

China relies on imports for its supply of white feather broiler chickens, which are favored by fast-food chains like KFC and McDonalds for their more rapid development and plumper meat, compared with yellow-feathered birds, which are native to China and generally sold retail.

The investigation comes just months after Beijing slapped hefty penalties on sugar imports from top growers such as Brazil and Thailand after lobbying by domestic mills.

In 2016, Brazil accounted for 85 percent of China's frozen chicken imports. which totaled almost 600,000 tonnes valued at as much as $1.23 billion, customs data shows.

The push by China's domestic industry for an anti-dumping probe comes as poultry farmers and processors recover from the nation's worst outbreak of bird flu in years.

Chicken is a cheap alternative to pork, the nation's favorite meat. The outbreak hurt demand for chicken meat as people worried about catching the deadly virus and sent prices <0#JCI-BROILER> to more-than-decade lows in February.

Live broiler chicken prices in Shandong province, one of the nation's major producing areas, have since more than doubled, and were around 7.7 yuan ($1.15) on Friday, as the crisis passed and worries about infection eased.

Import prices from Brazil have remained quite low in comparison, making it hard for the local industry to compete, analysts said.

Shan Xuewei, a broiler chicken trader based in Shandong, said he believed the probe was unnecessary.

"Brazilian chicken is indeed cheap ... and people of course will go for the cheaper stuff."

Source: Reuters

Canada suspends Brazil meat imports from two plants in food scandal

Canada suspended meat imports from two Brazilian plants under investigation in a meatpacking scandal, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said on Tuesday, becoming the latest buyer to distance itself from the world's top beef and poultry exporter.

The food inspection agency said both plants were approved to export meat to Canada but neither had done so for six months.

Other nations, including China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Japan and Switzerland, have also curtailed meat imports from Brazil after a probe into corruption by health inspectors and the alleged sale of rotten products.

Source: Reuters

Fall armyworm 'threatens African farmers' livelihoods'

The fall armyworm poses a major threat to food security and agricultural trade, warns the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (Cabi).

It says farmers' livelihoods are at risk as the non-native insect threatens to reach Asia and the Mediterranean.

The Food and Agriculture Organization plans emergency talks on the issue.

The armyworm, so called because it eats its way through most of the vegetation in its way as it marches through crops, is native to North and South America but was identified for the first time in Africa last year.

Cabi chief scientist Dr Matthew Cock said: "This invasive species is now a serious pest spreading quickly in tropical Africa and with the potential to spread to Asia.

"Urgent action will be needed to prevent devastating losses to crops and farmers' livelihoods."

Scientists think the caterpillar or its eggs may have reached the continent through imported produce.

Once established in an area, the adult moths can fly large distances and spread rapidly.

Dr Jayne Crozier, of Cabi, said the fall armyworm's presence had now been confirmed in west Africa and was thought to be present in the south and east of the continent, many parts of which rely on maize for their staple diet.

"It's possibly been there for some time and it's causing a lot of damage now," she told BBC News.

"The recent discovery of fall armyworm in Africa will be a huge threat to food security and also to trade in the region."

The FAO is to hold an emergency meeting in Harare between 14 and 16 February to decide emergency responses to the armyworm threat.

It says the pest has been confirmed in Zimbabwe and preliminary reports suggest it may also be present in Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zambia.

An investigation by Cabi has found that the fall armyworm is established in Ghana.

Experts at Cabi say it could take several years to develop effective methods to control the pest.

Zambia has used army planes to spray affected areas with insecticides.

Source: BBC

Go wild to protect food security, says study

Researchers are concerned the genetic diversity of these vital plants are not being adequately stored in gene banks.

They say characteristics such as drought or heat resilience could be lost forever unless action is taken to preserve these genetic traits.

The findings have been published in the journal Nature Plants.

An international team of scientists found that "the diversity of crop wild relatives is poorly represented in gene banks".

In their assessment, they identified more than 70% of 1,036 wild relatives of 81 important food crops as a high priority for further collection.

They added that 95% were "insufficiently represented in regard to the fill range of geographic and ecological variation in their native distributions".

"The gene banks of the world are not, at the moment, doing as good of a job as they could be doing at maintaining and making available the diversity of crops' wild relatives," explained co-author Luigi Guarino, director of science and programs at the Crop Trust.

"There are very valid reasons why the are under represented in gene banks. They are difficult to collect, they are difficult to maintain, the collection and maintenance is expensive as well. Other things have had higher priority, such as cultivating material."

"However, with the threats that are facing biodiversity in general, and this particular subset of biodiversity, it is becoming increasingly urgent that adequate attention is paid to crop wild relatives," he told BBC News.

Going, going, gone?

There are in excess of 1,700 institutional crop gene banks around the world, storing millions of samples, otherwise known as accessions.

Their main role is to preserve genetic material, primarily in the form of seeds and cuttings, and to make this material available for future research and breeding.

These crop gene bank play a pivotal role in global food security as the world faces the challenge of feeding a growing population, changes to regions' climate and growing conditions.

Mr Guarino explained that crop wild relatives offered a "huge reservoir of diversity".

"Over the history of agriculture - from Neolithic times onwards - farmers have been whittling down the diversity available in wild plants to focus on a particular subset of that diversity that we call the domesticated crop," he said.

"This domesticated crop is just a selection from a much wider diversity of genes, traits and adaptations that are out there still in the ancestors and relatives of the crops we use today.

"They are out there but for how long? We know that there are lots of threats waiting in the background affecting biodiversity, such as land-use change, urbanisation, deforestation and climate change itself."

The study, lead by Nora Castanedo-Alvarez from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture and Colin Khoury from Wageningen University, suggested that advances in technological and knowledge of the plant world would mean that the genetic reservoir of crop wild relatives would be increasingly utilised.

However, this was based on the assumption that that the material would be readily available to researchers.

"What we argue in the paper is that one of the key things that we could do is to make sure that we have adequate representation of the diversity that is available in this reservoir of crop wild relatives available to us for use in gene banks," observed Mr Guarino.

"We also need to conserve this diversity in nature itself, allowing it to continue evolving. This is difficult to do, especially under climate change which is already causing movement of species polewards and to higher elevations."

The researchers said the time to act was now while it w as still possible to harvest the crop wild relatives and the potentially vital genetic resources.

They concluded: "A systematic effort was needed to improve the conservation and availability of crop wild relatives for use in plant breeding."

Source: BBC