WASHINGTON - U.S. poultry exporters face uncertain sales prospect to what had been their top market after food credits for Russia were apparently dropped from a final budget deal reached by Congress and the Clinton administration, an industry aide said on Friday.
“We're not giving up on the market,” Bill Roenigk, vice-president of the National Broilers Council, told Reuters. “It's too big. It's too important” to the industry.
But without USDA loan guarantees or direct credits “to prime the pump” and get sales going again, the outlook for exports to Russia is “uncertain” at best, Roenigk said.
Even now, many details of the budget pact are difficult to pin down. But spokespersons for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and fellow Mississippi Republican Sen. Thad Cochran both said that they did not believe that any food credits or direct food aid for Russia survived final negotiations.
One House Agriculture Committee aide said he was certain that there was no Russian credit or food aid provision survived in the agriculture portion of the $500 billion-plus budget agreement. But the aide said he couldn't absolutely guarantee that it had not survived elsewhere.
Roenigk said it was his understanding that the language had not survived, even though USA Today reported Friday that Lott and Cochran had secured $385 million to help Mississippi poultry producers offset lost sales to Russia.
A Lott spokesman said he was “99.9 percent” sure that report was wrong, but was attempting to get definitive word.
Warning: part of the article may be missing at this point.
Over the past year and a half, U.S. poultry exports have averaged about 80,000 tonnes per month, according to the U.S.A. Poultry and Egg Export Council in Stone Mountain, Ga.
But sales ground to a halt in August following the Russian rouble devaluation, Roenigk said.
Russia was also suspended from the U.S. Agriculture Department's GSM-102 export credit guarantee program in August after it began defaulting on its loans.
Poultry exporters have not used GSM-102 credits in recent years to make sales to Russia. But the program was an important tool for the industry early in the 1990s.
To get poultry sales moving again, Lott and Cochran drafted legislation that would have allowed USDA to provide export credits for Russia -- despite its current defaults.
When concerns were raised that would weaken the integrity of the GSM-102 program, lawmakers turned their attention to the GSM-5 program, a USDA direct credit program with less lending rigorous standards that hasn't been used in years.
When problems emerged with that approach, lawmakers mulled increasing funding for USDA food aid programs by $200 million. But that idea also did not survive the final cut -- at least not in the farm portion of the bill, the House aide said.
At the final stage, lawmakers were talking about a generic food aid fund that would not have been specific to Russia or any specific commodity, the aide said.
But it was likely that lawmakers would have recommended that USDA use the increased food aid funds for high-value goods, such as meat, poultry and vegetable oil, he said.
The idea behind that was that USDA was already expected to put together a grain food aid package for Russia, he said.
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